Prosecutors: ’93 attack caused ’07 death

updated 4:20 p.m. ET Jan. 20, 2008

PITTSBURGH - Two men imprisoned for beating a woman 15 years ago have been ordered to stand trial on homicide charges now that she has died, allegedly from the old wounds.

Shawn Sadik, 35, and Stevenson Rose, 43, are serving 15- to 30-year prison sentences for the beating of Mary Mitchell.

Mitchell was brain-damaged, bedridden and incapable of feeding herself when she died in September at a Pittsburgh-area nursing home.

Allegheny County Medical Examiner Karl Williams testified at a preliminary hearing on Friday that the 50-year-old woman died from long-term problems caused by head injuries she suffered in the July 1993 beating in Larimer.

Police said Sadik and Rose admitted to beating and stomping Mitchell after she became irate that the men had not held up their end of a bargain to provide her with crack in exchange for sex.

The defense argued that other factors should be investigated because Mitchell lived for so many years after the beating.

Similar charges have been filed in cases where there was even more time between an attack and a death.

In September, William Barnes was charged with murder in the 1966 shooting of a Philadelphia police officer. Barnes had already served an attempted murder sentence, but was charged again after Walter T. Barclay, who was left a paraplegic in the attack, died in August of an infection authorities say stemmed from the gunshot wound.

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