ALFRED — An attorney for Carol Sharrow entered pleas of not guilty and not criminally responsible to manslaughter and more than a dozen other charges Friday in connection with the hit-and-run death of a West Newfield man at a Sanford ball field in June.

Police said Sharrow drove her maroon Honda through the main gate and onto the field at Goodall Park on June 1 when a Babe Ruth baseball league game was being played. A video posted on Facebook that night by a witness shows players scattering as Sharrow’s car careened around the field.

Police said Sharrow’s vehicle hit Douglas Parkhurst as it left the ballpark, and kept going. Parkhurst, 68, died on the way to a hospital.

Sharrow, 51, did not speak during her brief appearance before Superior Court Justice John O’Neil on Friday afternoon. Annie Stevens, who along with Robert Ruffner is representing the Sanford woman, entered the pleas on her client’s behalf.

Stevens, outside the York County Courthouse after her client’s brief appearance, said a not criminally responsible plea means the defendant, at the time of the incident, did not have the ability to appreciate the wrongfulness of her behavior.

“She has come a long way,” said Stevens, who said Sharrow has been engaged in treatment. “She is in a very different mental state.”

“Carol was clearly delusional at the time,” Ruffner said.

The York County grand jury indicted Sharrow on 15 counts last month. As well as manslaughter, the indictment charges elevated aggravated assault, driving to endanger, leaving the scene of an accident and 11 counts of reckless conduct with a dangerous weapon.

During her June court appearance, Sharrow was ordered held on $500,000 bail and was required to undergo a mental health evaluation. In October, a judge ordered Sharrow to remain at the Riverview Psychiatric Center in Augusta, where she has been receiving treatment, as the case proceeds, court documents show.

Sharrow has a history of mental illness, Sanford police said in the days after the death.

Sanford police Detective Sgt. Matthew Jones in June said Sharrow was reported missing after leaving a Sanford restaurant in 2014 and was found in the woods by police 24 hours later.

A neighbor who lived in the same Sanford apartment building as Sharrow, Michael Horr, said he knew her to be a very caring person. They had been neighbors for a couple of years.

“She had some problems,” Horr said in an interview at the apartment building a few days after the incident. “I felt very bad when I found out what happened.”

Parkhurst was a Vietnam War veteran and a grandfather and had moved to West Newfield about five years ago. He confessed in 2013 to the unsolved hit-and-run death of a 4-year-old girl in Fulton, New York, in 1968, when he was 18 years old.

A dispositional conference has been scheduled for Dec. 13.

Tammy Wells can be contacted at 780-9016 or at:

twells@journaltribune.com

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