Karen Schmeer
“Fog of War” film editor. (Garret Savage)
David McKie (Steven Hirsch)
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“I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”
He’d killed thoughtlessly; he’d denied responsibility coldly. Only when the cuffs went on at sentencing did reckless thug David McKie — the petty-theft getaway driver who’d fatally mowed down a brilliant film editor on the Upper West Side — reveal something like a soul.
“I’m sorry,” McKie mouthed again and again yesterday, breaking into gasping sobs and turning toward the audience of a Manhattan courtroom where the friends of editor Karen Schmeer sat watching, themselves in tears.
McKie will serve five to 15 years for Schmeer’s January 2010 manslaughter. He’d struck Schmeer after blowing through four red lights on Broadway while trying to outrace cops after shoplifting a stash of cold medicines from a CVS at 86th and Amsterdam with a pair of buddies.
Schmeer was just 39 years old and at the height of her award-spangled career, having served as editor for such lauded documentaries as “Fast, Cheap & Out of Control,” and the Oscar winner “The Fog of War.”
A beautiful woman described as witty and warm by friends, she was carrying a bag of groceries across Broadway at 90th Street, just a block from her home, when McKie struck her. She was tossed into the air, bouncing off McKie’s car and a parked car before hitting the pavement.
“Her injuries were so extensive that no single cause of death could be determined,” lead prosecutor Peter Casolaro wrote in court papers.
“He looked me in the eye,” one of Schmeer’s friends, filmmaker Nina Davenport, said of McKie yesterday, after the emotional sentencing, sounding surprised.
Others among Schmeer’s friends, standing and embracing in a courthouse hallway, said the same thing — their dear friend’s killer had made a point of looking into the eyes of each of them before he was led away, his convulsive sobs audible even after he disappeared from sight.
“I’ll never know him; I’ll never see him again,” said Davenport, 45, of Brooklyn. “But at least he showed some sign of humanity,”
“I didn’t see it,” responded Maribeth Edmonds, 53, of South Hampton, one of Schmeer’s closest friends
“I hate him,” she said, in tears. “I’m just not open to it. Not yet.”
The defense lawyer had claimed during the sentencing that McKie, who had no criminal record, was a “salvagable” young man with a “brilliant future.”
Those words had stung Edmonds.
“He has a brilliant future?” Edmonds said, her voice choked by tears. “Karen had a brilliant future. We had a brilliant future together. We were going to grow old together.”
McKie was initially charged with murder under the legal theory that he had displayed a depraved indifference to human life. But a recent, precedent-setting state Court of Appeals reversal in a very similar Rochester case made it unlikely that a murder conviction against McKie could ever be sustained.
He was allowed to plead guilty in July, to manslaughter — leaving Schmeer’s friends grappling to understand how McKie’s actions could ever be construed as less than depraved, and as less than murder.
Schmeer’s work lives on, her friends noted. Her final film, Bobby Fisher Against the World, was lauded at Sundance. A fellowship for emerging young editors has been created in her name — the Karen Schmeer Film Editing Fellowship, the details of which are at KarenSchmeer.com.