A Glen Burnie man pleaded guilty Tuesday to choking a prostitute and was sentenced to time served after his victim, Mary Norris, went missing.
Shannon Yearby, 30, pleaded guilty to second-degree assault in the Aug. 17 strangling of Norris, 44, inside her South Baltimore home on South Payson Street. Baltimore City Circuit Judge Gale Rasin sentenced Yearby to three years of supervised probation and ordered him to stay away from Norris.
Prosecutors agreed to the plea deal without consulting Norris, because, they said, they couldn’t find her.
An assistant state’s attorney had the court send Norris a subpoena, called her cell phone repeatedly, and even sent a police officer to her house, but could not locate her, said Margaret Burns, spokeswoman for the Baltimore City State’s Attorney’s Office.
In October, Norris — an admitted prostitute — went public with her account of the attack in The Examiner.
“I’m one of the lucky ones: I’m alive,” Norris said at the time. “I was able to get away. Some of the other women down here weren’t so lucky.”
A police report gave the following account of the incident: Norris brought home Yearby, who agreed to pay her $21 to engage in a sex act. After he had finished the sex act, during which he wore a condom, Yearby asked for another sex act, which Norris refused.
They began to argue, and he “began to choke the victim.”
Norris’ husband, Francis, who was asleep upstairs, was awakened by the commotion and got into a scuffle with Yearby.
Yearby grabbed a wooden pole and Francis Norris grabbed a machete. Norris struck Yearby in the head with the machete, cutting his ear.
After struggling with Norris’ husband, Yearby escaped. But police surveillance cameras caught him running down the street, blood gushing from a wound to his ear inflicted by the machete.
After the attack, Norris ran into a police officer she knew. Armed with the used condom she had saved, police matched the DNA to Yearby, officers said. He was arrested two days later and was held in jail on a $250,000 bail on attempted murder charges, before Tuesday’s plea deal.
“I have a lot of sleepless nights now, and it’s not getting better, but it could be worse,” Norris, who was left with large welts on her neck and the psychological trauma of a near-deadly encounter, told The Examiner. “All of the prostitutes have to stick together; no one else cares about us.”
