Shawn O’Brien: Part 2

All witnesses, purchas of interest, and suspects are considered innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Welcome to Primetime Crime. I'm your host, Kylie. Let's talk right now and true crime, and then together we are going to work on warming up some cold cases. Let's go. Hey, guys, welcome to another episode of Primetime Crime. It's Kylie. I'll be straight up and honest with you. I am not at all in the mental headspace right now to record a right now and true crime, so I'm going to honor that and not record right now in true crime. I do have some pretty important stuff to talk about for right now and true crime. I just can't do it right now. So we are going to go ahead and get started with today's episode, and right now and true Crime will definitely happen for the episode that I have coming out Thursday evening Friday morning, so catch me on Thursday. So we go through everything. We will probably have a lot to cover by that point, but one topic in particular I really want to spend some time on and I have to be in the right mental headspace to do it, and I am currently not. I'm not gonna lie and say, I am. There is a really tough side of true crime, and I'm kind of going through the motions of that right now, but I will talk more about that on the episode I released Thursday evening, So we are going to go ahead and start with today's episode. Thank you guys so much for being here. All right, guys, welcome to part two of the Unsolved Homicide of Sean O'Brien. I hate that I had to make this two parts, but when you see the amount of information that I'm going to be cramming in to part two, you will understand. So in the last episode, I talk about Sean being discovered, how his roommate armand Slash Landlord Armand was saying that he thought he had been seizing for over an hour. Why he wouldn't have called for emergency services at that point, I don't really know, but they basically laid Sean to rest, but his family was still very much pushing for this to be looked at as more than just a seizure and a fall. Something majorly had gone on. People at the hospital even thought that this was an accident, like something really happened to Sean. So finally, after the urging of the family. The family kept on, kept on, kept on. On July twenty seventh, law enforcement finally established Seawn's basement apartment as a crime scene, and they had very much his family, his siblings had very much been going to law enforcement time and time and time again to get them to try to look at this as more than just an accident. And one of the cops quickly blamed a hospital for not letting them know that Sewn could have been a potential victim. They were kind of waiting for the hospital to do that. So I will say that the hospital definitely dropped the ball on that, and they should have gotten ahead of that, so it could have been established as a crime scene way before it was. Because in the midst of all of this, Armand and Lynn are coming and going as they please, I'm sure, cleaning up potential evidence, of course, and it just wasn't handled right from the start, from all aspects, from law enforcement to the hospital. Everything wasn't handled the proper way. So law enforcement consulted with the met examiner and they said that the trauma that Sean sustained was not consistent with the fall following a seizure, and they also said that there was blood evidence and blood spatter in areas separate from the location in which Sean was found in the basement apartment. So in the midst of all this, they bring Armand and Lynn into the station to question them, and oddly enough, they did and separate them, which is a huge oversight mistake. They questioned them together, and Armand was very shaken up by all of this. There were points that he could even like speak and answer questions because he was like so visibly shaken up. And they even let Lynn write Armand's statement for him, which is insane. So after they completed the interview, Armand and Lynd returned home and investigators went home with them. So Lynn and Armand return home, and at that point other law enforcement is there securing the house as a crime scene. So the law enforcement officers, Lynn and Armand went into the backyard of the home and started talking. So at this point Armand is like visibly freaking out. He is very very shaken up, doesn't know what to do with himself, and said that he wanted a lawyer and he wasn't going to speak with investigators any further. So the detectives pretty much said that you know, you have that right. That's good. And the detectives then were trying to speak a little bit more with Lynn, and she really wasn't saying much. She was having a hard time recollecting some of the events of that evening with Sean when she was asked. But at the same time, Armand is trying to interject and fill in the gaps, and law Enforcement's like, yo, you waved your right. You have to have a lawyer present in order to continue this interview. But Armand was literally chopping at the bit during this conversation so much that then he reversed his decision to have a lawyer present. What a freaking nightmare. You cannot make this stuff up. So they then continued on with their interview and they noticed that that he had had some scratches on his face, so they asked him, what's going on with the scratches on your face, and that's when he said that and Lynn had been in an argument on Friday and that she physically assaulted him. And it was from that the two law enforcement officers went back to the station, reported back to their superiors, told them kind of what happened during this conversation, and at that point they decided that they were going to bring a lin in for domestic assault, and they did. They arrested her and they set her bail at ten k. So here's why this story and timeline is so important. So Friday night is the night that Amy, Natalia, and Sean were going to go to the community festival, but Natalia didn't feel good, so Amy had dropped Shawn off at the home was going to go back and pick him up. And then when they decided they weren't going to go to the festival, Amy and Natalia went and picked Sewn up and then brought him to the bar where they dropped him off so he could play Keino. And that is the last time we know of Sean being alive. And well, it's also important to remember that when Amy dropped Sean off that evening initially to the house after work, she had seen Armand and Lynn's car both in the driveway, so both of them were home at the time. Now, Armand was the owner of the home slash landlord, and Lynn previously didn't live in the home, but she was moved into the home at some point, and we're going to talk about that. But that was a big point of contention for Sean because him and Lynn did not get along because Lynn, and we're going to find out, has an attitude problem and has a temper. So all of that was going on. Sean came home, Armand and Lynn were both there. He did not want to be there that night. Whatever happened, he just didn't want to be there. So that is why he wanted to go to the bar and play Keino for a little while. So Sean leaving that house and knowing that Armand and Lynn were both there is super important for this next part of the story. So Lynn's story about the verbal and physical altercation between her and Armand, she said it happened, and it happened earlier in the afternoon prior to Sean coming home, and she said when they got into that verbal and physical altercation where she scratched Armand, she left, meaning that when Amy had dropped Sean off after work, that she's saying that she had already left at that point because they had been in the argument and she was gone. And she said that she didn't end up coming back to the house until Saturday afternoon, and then she left the house Saturday at five pm. This was also contradicted by another one of Sean's siblings who had driven by the house eleven am on Saturday and saw both cars in the driveway. Their timelines are not adding up. They also were going kind of back over Armand's story and the different accounts of him telling the story about what happened on Saturday night leading up to Sean being found by his sister. He changed his story many times and was very inconsistent with what actually happened. He talked about how he thought Sean was watching a sports game, but Sewan didn't have a TV in his basement bedroom or his basement apartment, so he would have been having to watch TV elsewhere, which he typically didn't do, and he typically wouldn't go into those common areas of the home in his boxer shorts. That just wasn't the type of person he was, so none of that really made sense to Sean's family at all. The police department went ahead and processed Lynn's car. They were looking for any forensic evidence that could potentially tie her back to what happened to Sean. They ended up having a celebration of life for Sean. Armand and Lynn did not attend. Color Me shocked. So in November, just a few short months later, Lynn was arrested for violating a no contact order and they started kind of digging into her criminal history, realizing that she had had a lot of run ins with the law. She had previously had cops called on her due to a domestic assault and throwing a cup of hot water on her partner. At the time, there had also been a bit of an altercation between her and Sean, so Armand was Shawn's landlord prior to Lynn kind of coming into the picture and coming into the home, but her and Sean kind of always butted heads because Lynn is a shitzer. She likes to stir the pot and act up, and she had previously flipped one of the tables in Seawn's apartment over and said that she was going to kill him. And at one point, shortly before Lynn moved in, Armand told Sean that you need to move out. Lynn's gonna move in, and then Sean was like, Okay, that's fine, but you have to give me time to find a place to live. And then Armand went ahead and changed his mind and was like, no, you're good, you can stay. But Sean had confided in some of his family members that Lynn was like a sex worker and armand would always like offer Lynn to Sean in like a sexual way, and Sewan was always like, no thanks, because she's gross and he was dating Amy at the time, of course, but Sewn was saying like, she's essentially a prostitute and has like all of these STDs. But at the same time of all that going on, Lynn was kind of in Amy's ear talking about how Sean was bringing home all of these random women and sleeping with them and basically stirring the pot, trying to get Amy to be mad at Sean for cheating on her, and it was just like this whole drama filled thing. So leading up to Sean's death, he was actively searching for another place to live, and unfortunately he didn't get the chance because he ended up losing his life in a super uber suspicious way. Which I am not a person that believes in coincidences, and I don't believe for a second that this was an accidental seizure that ended up with Sean falling and hitting his head causing this irreversible brain damage. You will never for a second catch me believing that this was any type of accident. So about a year after the murder, NBC did a special and they interviewed Sean's sisters and they very much spoke about how there was a lack of urgency from the police in regards to their brother's case, actually thinking it was a crime and then closing the house and making it a crime scene. They said that there was a huge lack of urgency from police. Investigators also participated in the NBC special and they basically said, again it was the hospital's kind of the hospital spot, like putting the ball in the hospital's court, like they should have let us know that this looked a little suspicious, and at that point in time they did go ahead and publicly state that Lynn and Armand were official persons of interest in the murder of Sean O'Brien. Let me backtrack a little bit. There was also in the midst of Lynn telling Amy that Sean was like creeping around and that he was sleeping with all of these women. Sean and his sister ended up confronting Lynn about it, and Lynn ended up punching Sean in the face and again threatened to kill him. The police were called, but unfortunately Sean had a bench worn out for failing to appear during a previous court hearing. So he ended up being arrested and armand was upset through Lynn out, but she ended up coming back creeping around, and that's when this incident happened, unfortunately in July, and Sean lost his life. So we are now two years after Sean's death, and Natalia, his daughter, is sixteen, and she is so wise beyond her years. She ended up just kind of reflecting on the loss of her dad and all of the unknown. The investigation had kind of halted. There really wasn't much going on, They hadn't made any official arrests, and she was just kind of writing it down, feeling her feelings. I am going to read that to you now. I always thought my dad would live forever, the idea that all little girls have that their dad is invincible, can battle monsters under the beds, Spider's boyfriends and college admissions. Over two years ago, I stepped off an elevator into the intensive care unit at the hospital and I expected to walk out alongside my father. But he was in a deep coma and if by some chance a miracle happened, he would not talk, walk, or even recognize me. That week was also the week that I developed depression, insomnia, and an anxiety disorder called PTSD. I have been battling these disorders for a full two years. Now. I am left behind with no father, no father to see me graduate, to walk down the aisle, or to watch me achieve my dreams. I have no answers, just memories and pictures. What my family and I really need is closure. This is where we need help. We are reaching out to anyone that is willing to give us any type of assistance. We need to know who took Sean Patrick O'Brien away from us, because he was truly the most important person in my life. So from there, sweet little sixteen year old Natalia, ten years go by, and Natalia grows up, and in twenty nineteen, which is a whole thirteen years after Sean's death, Natalia is now twenty seven years old, and she decided that is going to be the time that she is going to officially try to do something about what happened to her dad and really take a stand and get the word out and spread the message of what happened to her dad and how there's been little to no progress in his case, figuring out what exactly happened, finding the people responsible. So she has made this now her life's mission to keep his story out there. So, in her new adventure of trying to figure out what happened to her dad and get closure for her and her family, she reached out to the Cranston Police Department and she said she wanted everything. She wanted all of the information. They had, all of the case files, everything, And the chief of the Cranston Police Department basically wrote her a letter and they had a redacted version of a statement that one of the first responders had given, but they said that they couldn't give her anything other than that which is complete BS. Just putting it out there that's complete BS. And the chief also had said that, quote, your father's death has never been determined to be a homicide by the Medical Examiner's office, and the investigation have been closed absent any new information coming to light end quote. So when the medical examiner determined cause of death, they really weren't able to say if it was homicide, but they definitely knew that there was some crazy impact to the head, lots of trauma. But they ultimately ended up saying undetermined for the cause of death. So Natalia took it upon herself at that point to contact the medical examiner to talk about the way that his death was classified, And she did end up meeting with the actual medical examiner who prepared the report, and they sat down and went over it with Natalia and anything else that was in the medical examiner report. There was two statements, one that was made by the first responder that responded to the scene and the other one was made by Ormond, So she didn't really have much to go off of in this meeting with the medical examiner, and she wrote it all down and wrote a letter to the medical examiner kind of document their conversation, and she said, based on your expertise, the body presented and the story did not match, resulting in an undetermined manner of death. We reviewed the evidence provided to you by the Cranston Police Department, which was minimal at best. It gave you no clear story and provided no evidence of a perpetrator and an absent compelling story. There was insufficient reason to rule the death a homicide. That is why they said. The medical examiner said that they weren't able to rule it as a Homit side because they essentially didn't have enough information from the police department, from the Cranston Police Department to do so. So what's happening here is the police department is saying the medical examiner needs to give us more information, say that this is a homicide and we'll look into it further. And the medical examiner is saying, we need more information from the police department to look at this as a homicide. So both parties are just pointing at each other saying it's your fault, it's your fault, and they are sending Natalia running in circles trying to figure out what is going on. To try to get to the bottom of this for her dad, Natalia did everything she could. She would ask for more information and they would always block her request, and then it was just like a vicious cycle of her fighting with them to try to get this information. So the NBC news station that initially did that story a year after Sean's passing did a follow up news story and they did this with Natalia. It was set fourteen years later, and there was an investigative reporter that was involved in this and he was very much willing to try to get armand and Lynn to speak. So he attempted to speak with Lynn and she said she was interested and armand was still living in the home where Sean died, and he also refused to speak with the reporters in regards to anything having to do with Shan and his death. They decided to bring in a forensic pathologist named Timothy Gallagher. They wanted him to review the autopsy report and kind of get a second opinion, So they asked him if they thought that the injuries that Sean had were consistent with a fall to the ground, and tim Gallagher said, most likely not. This is the classic signs of somebody being assaulted, but then again, there is an outside possibility that this could have been the result of an accident. They discussed all of this and there are different findings with the current chief of police in Cranston, and unfortunately, they said that they have reinterviewed some of the persons of interest and they don't have anything substantial to really go off of. Nothing more that is going to help further their investigation into figuring out what exactly happened with Sean. Now, they did have a tip come in and it was a tip from Shawn's niece. She had come by with Sean's sister the day that he was found, and she said that she saw Lynn getting into her car with a gold lamp under her arm. So they got this tip about this gold lamp, and they tried to track down this gold lamp, tracked down this lead. They were looking for this lamp that was missing allegedly from Sean's apartment, and they ended up going to the state landfill, but they ended up not fighting anything. And if you remember, there was a lot of items missing from the apartment. His dumbbells were missing. There was also a potential love seat that was missing, a radio was missing, So I don't know why they were so hell bent on just looking for this gold lamp. All those other items were missing as well. So after the story aired, there was like new hope kind of breathed into Sean's case because after such a long time, people were finally talking about it again, and Italia kind of got like the second wind where she felt like she needed to keep going. So she did. She kept going, She kept putting his story out there. She started a website, Justice for Shanobrien dot com. She announced a reward, and she also started an anomous tip line. She created a Facebook group called Justice for Sean O'Brien, which I am going to link below in the show notes, and she was printing flyers up left and right, putting them all over the area. She ended up finding a group of forensic pathologists and kind of mass sent out the autopsy report to all of them, wondering what their thoughts on the matter were, and five to six of them responded and said it looked like a homicide to them, But of course they were charging like an astronomical rate, so they weren't able to really pursue anything with them because they were charging a lot of money to continue on with this. But one of them ended up contacting her and he basically said, quote, it was medically impossible for these wounds to have happened in any other way than a homicide. Don't leave this alone. End quote. He basically had explained that Sean had multiple brain injuries noted and it was almost like his brain had ricochet in his head, so there was some significant damage done to Sean's brain. He said, in his opinion, he thought that it had possibly been like a baseball bat that was the weapon of choice versus a hammer, just because of the manner in which everything was kind of laid out in the medical examiner's report, the way that the brain looked and all of the different errors of the brain that had damage to it, it looked like it had been done by a larger object. She even after many attempts, got this forensic examiner to put it in writing that in his opinion, the manner of death for Shan O'Brien was a homicide. And she very much went back and forth with the Cranston Police department. The medical examiner didn't really know why they wouldn't take it seriously, but felt that if they admitted that this was a homicide it is currently unsolved, they would have had to admit that they really really messed up by not securing the house as a crime scene, immediately letting all of those people come in and out of the crime scene. Armand was there, Lynn was there? Just a freaking disaster of a securing a crime scene. So Natalia thinks that if they admit that this is a homicide, then they'll have to kind of backpedal and backtrack and try to cover their bases for all of their wrongdoings. But I say it all the time. Mistakes happen, and cops, investigators, they're all human people make mistakes. We're all human. That's human nature. And if it happens, it happens. We need to take it and use it as an opportunity to learn from it so things like this don't happen again, so another family doesn't have to go through what n Italian Amy and Brian's sisters have had to go through. It just never. It shouldn't have happened in the first place, but avoiding it and not admitting that you did something wrong also doesn't make it any better. It just makes it worse. Natalia continues to advocate for her dad. She wants there to be justice for him, and she very much said that this forensic examiner saying that he thought that Sean's death was a homicide and there's no way that this could have been an accident, kind of reignited her spark and she feels like she needs to keep on going. Natalia and her mom very much think that the night that Friday night, after Sean returned home from the bar, that Sean came home, went to sleep and at some point was woken up being struck in the head while he was like in the middle of sleeping, and then he was just left down there all day to suffer, which is so horrible to think about. When Sean was taken from that house, he was still alive, and the fact that he was beaten so badly that he just laid there and suffered and probably seized. I cannot even imagine what this poor man went through, and that in itself is horrific. And anybody that is able to do that to another human or cover it up and help kind of make it seem like it was an accident, they're horrible people. And guarantee you if this was Lynn allegedly in my opinion, because she probably got away with doing this to Sean. She obviously has a temper, She's been in trouble with the law before, she's assaulted other people. She's probably done it since, and she's probably going to do it again. She is, allegedly, in my opinion, a very very dangerous person. So Natalia isn't stopping. She is keeping everything going, getting the word out about her father's death and trying to solve this case. She knows that she doesn't have a lot of investigators in her corner. She doesn't have support of the police department, but she is doing all of the right things trying to get the story out there so hopefully they can figure out what happened to Sean and arrest the people that are responsible. In my research, I found a Reddit post that she had made on the Rhode Island subreddit on Reddit, and it's just talking about her father's case, exactly what happened. She kind of summarized it and she said police have taken extensive amount of evidence and conducted countless interviews, but no progress is made. By their own admission, the police believe Armand and Land to be the two prime Sussex, but without any new evidence or the willingness to cooperate, the case has reached a dead end. I'm desperate for help and answers. I have been trying to solve this on my own for months, investigate, investing time and resources to get the word out and hopefully someone will come forward. But I'm out of my league. I am no detective. Any help would be greatly appreciated. She's basically on there just asking for any help or advice to try to figure out how to navigate this further. There was also a lot of people from Rhode Island that didn't know anything about this case, which just goes to show you that there's been little to no media attention surrounding it because Rhode Island is pretty small. So it really just goes to show you that Sean's case hasn't really gotten the attention that it needs and deserves, and law enforcement, the hospital officials that should have immediately called the police department that Daan said, we think that this is more of a attack. He's a victim. This wasn't a seizure. So many people dropped the ball that day, and I think that ended up with it being an unsolved cold case to this day and me talking about it now present day, twenty twenty four when it happened in two thousand and six. There isn't anything good that has come out of the story other than Natalia's fight for justice for her dad and continuing to keep his story out there. I think that's how I found it. I think I don't even know exactly how I found his story. It might have been a Facebook pop up that I just saved, But I do want to credit my primary source for this episode. I had a few different sources that I pulled things from, but my primary source was Murder. She told they have a whole article that was published in twenty twenty two that kind of goes through everything with Armand and Lynn and Sean and everything after and leading up to it. So I wanted to make sure I verbally give them credit because they had the most in depth information that I could find. Of course, some of the other things that I found also overlapped, but I have to shout them out and give credit where credit is due. But I'm going to include the Facebook page, the website that Natalia made for her dad, and any other pertinent information that I feel like I need to include in the show notes, and hopefully we can get justice for Sean. I think twenty twenty four sounds like an awfully good year to get justice for him and keep the story out there. There are people out there that know what happened, whether they were directly or indirectly involved, they know what happened and they need to do the right thing. We have to continue to put the pressure on these people so that way they feel like the gig is up and they just decide to do what's right and admit their wrongdoings and Sean can get the justice that he deserves. His family can finally rest knowing that they did what they needed to do to get justice for Sean. So that is the episode. Thank you so much for staking with me for two parts and I really appreciate it. I hope you guys have a fantastic week ahead and I will see you Friday for a brand new case and a brand new episode. Have a good one. Bye. Hello Twisted Humans. Do you find yourself wanting to know more about the latest murder, conspiracy, cult, or haunting than this is the podcast for you. In nineteen fifty two, there was a record high of UFOs reported fifteen hundred sightings. There has been evidence of human sacrifice, double warship, and it is haunted by more spirits than can be counted. A family of two adults and two kids reportedly saw a giant flying thing with glowing red eyes. And meanwhile, the family's nanny that helped Veronica to care for her and Lucian's children, was found bludgeoned to death in the basement of their family home. I'm Milicia and I'm Sierra, and this is twisted and uncorked