Healdsburg killer gets 26-to-life in prison

<p>Sheyna Douprea only had one response to life's disappointments: extreme violence.</p><p>Tuesday that pattern brought her a 26-years-to-life term in prison for the murder of her boyfriend.</p><p>The 25-year-old Healdsburg woman had a track record of picking romantic partners suffering from drug and alcohol problems. When they let her down, she responded by biting them, punching them or gouging them with two-inch long fingernails.</p><p>On Dec. 14, 2008, while on probation for attacking a former boyfriend, Douprea returned to the Healdsburg apartment she shared with Daniel Mooney, 46, to find him drunk and unable to attend an employer's Christmas party.</p><p>She flew into a rage, grabbed a knife and attacked the incapacitated man, beating him in the face and stabbing him four times in the neck.</p><p>Douprea claimed she acted in self-defense and was suffering battered women's syndrome at the hands of a heavy drinker. </p><p>Jurors didn't believe her. They said she was a predator and convicted her in August of first-degree murder.</p><p>Tuesday her fate became final. Judge Gary Medvigy faced Douprea and described the killing of her boyfriend as a “death sentence by a vigilante, for being an alcoholic.”</p><p>He gave Douprea 25 years to life in prison for the murder and an additional year for using a knife.</p><p>“You just simply are an incredibly violent woman with an uncontrollable amount of rage,” Medvigy told Douprea.</p><p>His comments came in an emotional hearing for Douprea, the mother of a 4-year-old girl and Windsor High graduate who aspired to be a journalist.</p><p>The remarks followed a short video on the life of Mooney that was set to the music of the rock band, Lynyrd Skynyrd.</p><p>Douprea, dabbing at teary eyes, apologized for the death of a man she said she loved but maintained it was self-defense.</p><p>Her new lawyer, Jeff Mitchell, had earlier presented documents saying Mooney was not unconscious on a combination of alcohol and Benadryl, as prosecutors contended. Mitchell asked for a new trial on the grounds that her former lawyer would not let her testify.</p><p>The new trial motion was denied.</p><p>“I never would have reacted the way I did that day if I didn't think my life and life of my daughter...was in danger,” Douprea told the court.</p><p>Her mother, Gena Douprea of Windsor, spoke in support of her daughter. She said her daughter was a good mother and she hoped “Sheyna is in our life.”</p><p>But prosecutor Bob Waner said she is a murderer and should be punished as prescribed by law. </p><p>Waner said Mooney was “in no way responsible” for his death and had been lying on his bed in his undershorts at the time of the attack.</p><p>He pointed to changing statements from Douprea about what happened and her attempts to hide the knife at the bottom of a diaper pail.</p><p>“What this is ... is a result of her unchecked serial fits of rage,” Waner said. “It resulted in an extremely brutal murder.”</p><p>According to a probation report, Douprea said she had a “horrific” childhood marked by physical and sexual abuse from her mother's partners, but she managed to graduate from high school with an admirable grade point average.</p><p>She once attacked her mother's boyfriend with a butcher knife when he made a comment about her cat and beat a female friend who was driving her to work, the report states.</p><p>Two past boyfriends testified Douprea beat them, in part because they refused to have sex with her. A man she was married to in 2005 in Las Vegas said at trial she grew her fingernails as weapons and threatened him with a knife.</p><p>Mooney himself had obtained a 30-day restraining order in Sept. 2008 before the two reconciled. Two-and-a-half months later he was dead.</p>