(Note, up above I interview Randi Berger, her friend Karen, and Susan McCoy, a friend of Marcie Sherman’s)
Ed and Marcia “Marcie” Sherman are brother and sister, and they died approximately ten months apart.
Ed died on Christmas Day 2017, while Marcie died on October 27, 2018.
For six years, Marcia’s daughter Randi Berger has gone everywhere for answers. The authorities insist nothing untoward happened with either death.
So, Randi came to me.
Ed Sherman had been a very successful entertainment lawyer, working with Motown, Barbra Streisand, and others, but in 2017, he was in the twilight of his life.
The ex-girlfriend, Barbara Garrison, of a former client reached out in a desperate situation. Ed Sherman made the mistake of letting her stay at his home.
“My uncle took her in because he was one of those bleeding hearts who wanted to help everyone,” Randi said on the show.
Garrison turned into the houseguest from hell; Randi said that toward the end of his life, Garrison engaged in elder abuse.
“He tried to evict her. They were fighting a lot, and then in August 2017, Barbara Garrison called my mom and said he was very sick. My mom said, ‘call an ambulance.’”
Ed Sherman was diagnosed with environmental poisoning; he went to the hospital multiple times, Randi told me.
The hospital finally sent people to his home; an investigation found the home not inhabitable.
At the same time Randi told me, Garrison successfully isolated her uncle. Friends and family could only speak to him outside his home, she told me.
His birthday was in November, and Randi said no one in the family saw him on his birthday or for Thanksgiving in 2017.
Marcie Sherman, also an attorney, reached out to a friend, Andy Shapiro. Shapiro runs the Lewitt Hackman Law firm.
I sent out an email to Mr. Shapiro, but he did not respond.
Shapiro, Randi told me, gave the case to Kira Masteller, a lawyer and shareholder in the same firm.
I sent an email to Ms. Masteller. She did not respond but then blocked my follow up email.
Masteller agreed to draw up a “settlement agreement” which would pay Garrison off and remove her from her home. The agreement was for $12,000.
“My mom did not necessarily want to pay her off, but she contacted Andy Shapiro the partner of the Lewitt Hackman, who both my mom and my uncle knew.” Randi explained, “She was given Kira Masteller. My mom did not know probate law; she did not know landlord/tenant.”
Randi said that her mom wanted the settlement agreement to be the end. That $12,000 would get this woman out of the house.
Randi told me that Masteller was only supposed to draft this settlement agreement, but that’s not what happened.
In early December, Garrison was still not out of the house, and Masteller told the family to stay away from the home, Randi recalled.
“She (Masteller) sent an email to my mother saying we should not go near the house, she was helping my uncle- sorry- she was helping Barbara Garrison move out.” Randi told me.
Here is an email the Ms. Masteller sent to Marcia Sherman on December 21, 2017.
Marcia,
I do not recommend creating further problems.
If you want to have someone other than you or your daughter stay there at night, that is up to you.
Is there something of value in Eddy's house that you feel she will take? Do you want to take steps to safe guard something?
Used furniture or kitchen items are generally not worth creating legal fees over
Four days later; Ed Sherman was dead.
He was admitted to the hospital on December 22, 2017; on December 25, 2017, he died.
The official cause of death was blunt force trauma to the head.
Officially, this was due to a fall at the hospital.
Randi doesn’t believe it, and neither does her friend Karen, who joined me in the interview.
Karen has experience in autopsies, and she shared a report with her conclusions.
As a Canadian studying Paramedicine 20 years ago, I assisted a well-known Canadian pathologist during some of his autopsies. I have an Ontario Provincial license as a Paramedic as well as an Ontario Provincial license as an Paramedic. I have concerns regarding conflicting information on Ed Sherman’s Hospital photos taken the last time he was admitted on 12/22/2017, 3 days prior to death, versus an accident report provided to Randi by a private investigator hired in 2022, a little over 4 years after Ed Sherman’s death. Photos provided by the hospital taken of Mr. Sherman on 12/22/2017, 3 days prior to his death, show significant abuse and/or neglect. These photos reflect a hematoma on his head, suspect deep tissue injuries and other unstageable injuries. In addition, it is my understanding that an autopsy was supposed to occur and, over 4 years later, the private investigator informed Randi that never happened. The private investigator ceased all communications with Randi after providing this report.
These are my observations:
The attached accident report provided to Randi Berger by private investigator Greg Everett, over 4 years after Mr. Sherman’s death on Dec 25th 2017 indicates:
A. There was no medical evidence.
B. There was no physical evidence.
C. There was no evidence log.
D. COD: Blunt force head trauma.
E. There is no blunt force head trauma indicated on the diagram on the 2 nd page of the new case report, of the accident.
F. On this new case report of the accident, it listed Mr. Sherman’s weight at 200 pounds and Randi informed me that she believes he weighed approximately 50 pounds under the weight stated on thereport at the end of his life.
Karen said she studied several photos taken at the hospital, and she said they are key to understanding the death.
In each photo, Karen said that the date typed out was 12/22/2017, while it was written in marker 12/23/2017. She believes that the photos were taken on December 22, 2017, the day Ed arrived at the hospital, and someone is trying to cover-up and make it look as though they were taken after he arrived.
“To me, this is abuse,” Karen said of the injuries in the photos.
Since the photos of major injuries were taken the day he arrived, Karen believes his injuries which caused his death occurred before he got to the hospital.
I reached out to the LA County Auditor which investigated his death, or so Randi said. Here’s their statement.
To the extent your inquiry may be considered to request public records pursuant to the California Public Records Act, be advised the Auditor-Controller’s Office of County Investigations has no records responsive to your request.
After Ed’s death, Masteller and Garrison did not remove themselves from Marcie’s life. She was past 80, but still in good shape, according to her friend Susan McCoy.
But McCoy said that the stress from the ongoing litigation was draining the life out of Marcia Sherman.
“After that {her uncle’s death} Kara Masteller contacted my mother and opened up probate litigation against her in breach of the settlement agreement,” Randi told me.
Randi continued.
After Kira Masteller emailed her saying her that Barbara Garrison opened up probate litigation to become executor of my uncle’s estate, I watched my mother have a nervous breakdown. She just turned 82; she was still practicing at the time, but she had all these people suing her- threatening her. She was fighting with the law firm; she was fighting with Kira Masteller.
Here is part of an email from April 2018 from Masteller to Marcie Sherman.
Hi Marcie,
Barbara Garrison has filed a Probate Petition. The hearing is May 21, 2018.
I have called the Attorney to get a copy of the Petition ASAP.
At around this time, Marcie’s son Fred Berger appeared.
Susan, whose known Marcie for decades, provided some interesting context. She said in all her years, she knew Randi well, and she knew that Marcie had another daughter who lived in England. Until he reappeared, Susan had never heard Fred’s name.
“He was obviously estranged,” she told me.
Throughout the summer of 2018, Marcie’s health deteriorated until in October 2018, she faced a choice: go into hospice or live with Fred.
Though she was facing hospice, Randi told me that she was not expecting her mom to die. Susan agreed with this notion.
Fred offered an attractive alternative; he lived in Simi Valley, California, which was close to Randi. The hospice was two hours away, Randi told me.
Randi even remembered Fred telling her to take a well-earned vacation, because he would take care of their mother.
That quickly turned into a nightmare.
Once Marcie moved in with her son, Susan never heard from her again. On October 18, 2018, Marcie moved in with Fred; on October 27, 2018, she was dead.
It would be about four years until Randi found out what happened. In 2022, she hired private investigator Greg Everett, and he discovered some startling things about the last couple weeks of her mother’s life. He found out that Fred had all sorts of documents drawn up, changing the will, the power of attorney and more. These documentswere drawn up on October 19, 2018, according to Everett's report.
Fred also withdrew a lot of money from bank accounts his mother had.
Everett also found all sorts of malfeasance in Marcie’s care.
I spoke with Greg Everett, who runs the Blade Investigations Group. He told me that he stands by his conclusions.
He said that he hoped that his report would “prod” the local police department, the Simi Valley PD, to open an investigation, but they didn’t.
He told me that their official conclusion was that Marcie Sherman died of natural causes.
I reached out to Simi Valley PD, but they did not respond to a voicemail for comment.
Everett told me one more thing: no one has interviewed Fred Berger about his mom’s death.
So, my interview with Fred was timely. In our short interview, he told me he could not speak because he was moving, offered to have me speak with his attorney, and then hung up when I asked for that name and phone number.
The litigation did not stop with Marcie’s death. After her death, Fred, using all the dubious new documents, tried to sell her home, below market value, Randi believed.
She hired Ken Dallara of the Dallara Law Firm to stop this sale. Dallara remembered a “shitshow.”
We were retained by Randi regarding the sale of the Trust House and allegations of not selling the house for a higher amount??? Something to that effect. Lots of allegations with little to no facts. In watching a bit of that interview, I saw the same thing of allegations/suppositions/conspiracy theories. We spent a lot of time chasing ghosts and trying to focus these people but…
We did some legal work regarding a restraining order between Lauren Schmitt and Frederic Berger, involving her working at Harley’s Bowl along with attempting to disqualify the attorney Datzker in a matter involving Fredric Berger and Daniel Clarke in a family law matter due to the fact that the attorney was sleeping with someone’s wife/boyfriend/girlfriend or was someone’s attorney who was leaking bad information about Lauren, I believe. My memory was that it was a total shit-show of everybody.
Randi fired back in an email.
Yes, my brother needed money and Kira Masteller kept saying we couldn't afford to keep my mom's home when in fact she thought we could afford to pay her a half a million dollars for litigation she created that my mother would have stopped had she not been murdered.
In the detective's report it shows my brother contacted my neighbors trying to get them to buy the home even before my mom was dead. They sold it without listing it with all of our items in it from the '60s and my mother's three dogs that my brother threatened to take to the pound.
I had put over a quarter of a million dollars in our bank accounts prior to that that he closed the night before she died and he filed an unlawful detainer against me immediately. The person who bought the house from them for approximately $300,000 below Market rented back to me for over 6,000 a month and they proceeded with a Sheriff's lockout to try to have me arrested even though I had a valid rental agreement and had given the new owner about 20,000 more dollars to stay there for the sake of my mother's three dogs because my home was destroyed in a fire and had been sitting burned out since 2013.
Dallara did not provide any more comments.
The litigation continues into the present; earlier this month, Randi fired off an email to Mr. Shapiro.
Dear Andy,
I have forwarded my email sent on December 6th, 2024. I would like a response from you by December 16th and to communicate further regarding ending this litigation that was perpetrated against my mother leading up to her death (less than a year after Ed's death) and then me since her death on October 27th, 2018.
If I do not hear back from you, it will be my understanding that you had full knowledge of, and were in agreement with, everything Kira Masteller, Paul Bauducco, Kyla Parrino and others at your firm engaged in connected to the deaths of my uncle and mother and what was done to me since my mother's death on October 27th 2018.
My intention is to communicate with you to end this litigation before including you in any further investigations or complaints.
I look forward to your prompt response.
The ordeal has consumed Randi’s life for six years; the estates of two successful attorneys are all but gone as well.
All of this starting from a simple settlement agreement.
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