Read More
A trial is made up of competing tales, versions of events that attorneys strive to convince jurors are the truth. Months before a civil wrongful death trial set to start later this winter, Dina Shacknai invites me to her home in Paradise Valley, Arizona, a rich town dotted with golf courses and tennis courts, having agreed, with no small amount of ambivalence, to give me her account of what happened to a woman named Rebecca Zahau and to Dina’s son Max Shacknai, who was six years old at the time.
The yard at Dina’s house is brown and untended; a play set that once belonged to Max sits in the sun unused. A housekeeper answers the door and leads me to a plush living room decorated in gold and black, with gilt-edge mirrors and a large oil painting of a bare-breasted woman. A library table is covered with family photos featuring Max, and Max’s room is kept as it was six years ago. "The Miss Havisham room,” Dina calls it.
“One of the reasons we picked Coronado instead of La Jolla is that you felt like nothing bad could ever happen in Coronado,” Dina tells me before launching into the chain of events that began for her on July 11, 2011, when her ex-husband, 54-year-old phar-maceutical tycoon Jonah Shacknai, called to say that their son was at Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego.
Like many wealthy Arizonans, the Shacknais went to the California coast to beat the heat every summer, even after their contentious divorce. “When Jonah went to Coronado, we all went to Coronado,” Dina says. The company Jonah had founded, Medicis Pharmaceutical, had made hundreds of millions with such products as the Botox alternative Restylane. (He sold the company to Valeant in 2012 for $2.6 billion.)
In the summer of 2011 he was living a few blocks from Dina in the Spreckels Mansion on Ocean Boulevard, near the historic Hotel Del Coronado, of Some Like It Hot fame. The sprawling house, built more than 100 years earlier by sugar heir John D. Spreckels, had once been Dina’s home, too—it was where she and Jonah celebrated their marriage, and it was where, just hours before he called, paramedics had responded to a 911 call and found their son at the bottom of a staircase beside a broken chandelier.
Max had been in the care of his father and his girlfriend of two years, a beautiful 32-year-old immigrant from Myanmar named Rebecca Zahau. When Dina got to the hospital, she says, Jonah told her that Max had fallen down the stairs and that the doctors were suggesting that he might have had a heart attack.
Jonah said that he and Dina needed to be tested for Long QT syndrome, a hereditary heart rhythm condition that can cause seizures even in the very young. As she pieced the story together, and Max was placed in a medically induced coma, she learned that Jonah had not been at the mansion at the time of the incident.
As Jonah later told the police, after taking his two children from his first marriage, Ethan and Gabby, to the airport (they were flying east to join their mother), he had gone to work out at a gym a few blocks from the house, where he said he received a hysterical, unintelligible phone call from Rebecca. He ran home, and by the time he got there medics were preparing to put Max into an ambulance.
The investigating officer who interviewed Rebecca later gave a deposition for the upcoming trial saying that Rebecca told the police that she had been in a downstairs bathroom when she heard either a crash or the barking of her dog, Ocean. She emerged to find Max lying on the floor in the foyer beside the staircase, badly injured; there were a few soccer balls in the area and a Razor scooter lying on his leg.
She called for her 13-year-old sister, Xena, who was visiting and had been taking a shower on another floor, and told her to call 911. The first officer on the scene described Rebecca as kneeling beside Max in a state of shock. She told him that when she found Max he was conscious and said one word to her: “Ocean.” Later, another officer said he overheard Rebecca telling Xena, “Dina is going to kill me.”
The yard at Dina’s house is brown and untended; a play set that once belonged to Max sits in the sun unused. A housekeeper answers the door and leads me to a plush living room decorated in gold and black, with gilt-edge mirrors and a large oil painting of a bare-breasted woman. A library table is covered with family photos featuring Max, and Max’s room is kept as it was six years ago. "The Miss Havisham room,” Dina calls it.
“One of the reasons we picked Coronado instead of La Jolla is that you felt like nothing bad could ever happen in Coronado,” Dina tells me before launching into the chain of events that began for her on July 11, 2011, when her ex-husband, 54-year-old phar-maceutical tycoon Jonah Shacknai, called to say that their son was at Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego.
Like many wealthy Arizonans, the Shacknais went to the California coast to beat the heat every summer, even after their contentious divorce. “When Jonah went to Coronado, we all went to Coronado,” Dina says. The company Jonah had founded, Medicis Pharmaceutical, had made hundreds of millions with such products as the Botox alternative Restylane. (He sold the company to Valeant in 2012 for $2.6 billion.)
In the summer of 2011 he was living a few blocks from Dina in the Spreckels Mansion on Ocean Boulevard, near the historic Hotel Del Coronado, of Some Like It Hot fame. The sprawling house, built more than 100 years earlier by sugar heir John D. Spreckels, had once been Dina’s home, too—it was where she and Jonah celebrated their marriage, and it was where, just hours before he called, paramedics had responded to a 911 call and found their son at the bottom of a staircase beside a broken chandelier.
Max had been in the care of his father and his girlfriend of two years, a beautiful 32-year-old immigrant from Myanmar named Rebecca Zahau. When Dina got to the hospital, she says, Jonah told her that Max had fallen down the stairs and that the doctors were suggesting that he might have had a heart attack.
Jonah said that he and Dina needed to be tested for Long QT syndrome, a hereditary heart rhythm condition that can cause seizures even in the very young. As she pieced the story together, and Max was placed in a medically induced coma, she learned that Jonah had not been at the mansion at the time of the incident.
As Jonah later told the police, after taking his two children from his first marriage, Ethan and Gabby, to the airport (they were flying east to join their mother), he had gone to work out at a gym a few blocks from the house, where he said he received a hysterical, unintelligible phone call from Rebecca. He ran home, and by the time he got there medics were preparing to put Max into an ambulance.
The investigating officer who interviewed Rebecca later gave a deposition for the upcoming trial saying that Rebecca told the police that she had been in a downstairs bathroom when she heard either a crash or the barking of her dog, Ocean. She emerged to find Max lying on the floor in the foyer beside the staircase, badly injured; there were a few soccer balls in the area and a Razor scooter lying on his leg.
She called for her 13-year-old sister, Xena, who was visiting and had been taking a shower on another floor, and told her to call 911. The first officer on the scene described Rebecca as kneeling beside Max in a state of shock. She told him that when she found Max he was conscious and said one word to her: “Ocean.” Later, another officer said he overheard Rebecca telling Xena, “Dina is going to kill me.”
0 comments: