March 25, 2005 – As church bells rang through the North Side neighborhood around Jasper Street, Syracuse police cars crept down the driveway of Chiarra Seals’ former home. The house, now surrounded by a web of yellow police tape, is where police found Seals’ two children alone Wednesday night, their mother missing.

Thursday morning the 23-year-old woman’s body was found two miles away on Avondale Place, and police have charged Syracuse University senior Brian T. Shaw with second-degree murder. Shaw is the father of Seals’ 4-year-old daughter.

Seals moved to the multi-family home at 160 Jasper St. a few weeks ago, neighbors said. The little interaction they had with her was positive, but they said they had witnessed domestic violence outside her residence in recent weeks.

‘Very smart-looking, very classy-looking, sweet,’ neighbor Gloria Segroi said of Seals, whom she had passed on the street a few times. ‘We just waved, but that’s all.’

The neighbors spoke of a domestic dispute that they said occurred outside Seals’ home on a recent Friday night.

Jesse Moleski, who lives directly across the street, said he called 911 when he witnessed a man and a woman fighting and screaming outside Seals’ home. Segroi called the confrontation a ‘knock-down, drag-out’ fight, and other neighbors said it was a ‘fistfight’ in which both the man and the woman attacked each other.

Moleski said the couple stopped fighting about five minutes after he placed the call to police and that they moved to the backyard. He heard more yelling from behind the house, he said, and then the man sped off in a car. The woman, he said, walked down the street talking on a cell phone. Moleski said the man and the woman – neither of whom he could positively identify – were gone by the time police arrived.

The living room windows of Moleski’s home offer a clear view of Seals’ house, and he said he didn’t see or hear a dispute Wednesday evening, when Shaw allegedly entered Seals’ residence, beat her in her bedroom, wrapped her body in a sheet and dragged her to his car.

‘To think that that happened and that no one saw them come out,’ Segroi said. ‘It’s no better or worse if you know them or not. The tragedy is the tragedy.’

Some of the neighbors have lived in their homes for decades, and they said they’ve watched their neighborhood, which was quiet yesterday but for the police milling about the crime scene, deteriorate over the years.

‘It’s getting to be quite like the South Side,’ Moleski said, referring to the region of Syracuse infamous for poverty and gang violence.

‘We’re thinking of selling the house and getting out of here,’ said Louis Segroi, Gloria’s husband. The couple has lived on Jasper Street since September of 1961, Louis Segroi said. Moleski said he has lived there since 1960.

Moleski and the Segrois lamented that the once tight-knit community was falling apart as families moved away.

‘I know it’s getting like this all over, which is disappointing, because I like it here,’ said Danielle Forgensi, an SU graduate who has lived on Jasper Street with her daughter for 16 years. She said the house has been in her family since her grandparents lived there and that many extended family members have lived nearby over the years.

Forgensi said the violence across the street from her home scares and surprises her, and she called Jasper a ‘very nice street.’

‘All of us neighbors help each other around here,’ Forgensi said.

On Avondale Place, two television news trucks with skyscraping antennas replaced the bustle of police that surrounded Seals’ home. Children scampered on the sidewalks, riding bikes and walking puppies just steps away from 112 Avondale Place, where police found Seals’ body in a suitcase behind the backyard garage.

Avondale, which intersects Westcott Street just south of its small entertainment district, is home to a mixture of local families and SU students, and it is a few blocks from Shaw’s home on Columbus Avenue.

Cindy Squillace, an Avondale resident and professional bereavement counselor, walked a vase of flowers from her home to a neighbor’s before stopping to chat with two young girls and a woman walking a dog. Squillace said she loves the diversity of a neighborhood situated on the outskirts of a major college campus.

It’s still unclear why the alleged killer dumped Seals’ body on Avondale, but the events of the last two days have sent two quiet blocks on opposite sides of the city into a spiral of shock and sorrow.

The neighbors know their homes will never be quite the same. But Squillace says she won’t let the proximity to the tragedy change her community for the worse.

‘We sure don’t want to run our lives in fear,’ she said. ‘And we won’t.’

Published on March 25, 2005 at 12:00 pm