Lawyer waives hearing in shooting death of hunter

Photographers seldom won the smile of Barry R. Groh.

But June 27 was an especially happy occasion - the high school graduation party for his younger son, Justin - and so he grinned for the camera. His wife, Theresa, stood beside him, blithely cocking her head upon his shoulder.

It was the Quakertown couple's last photo together. Theresa Groh carried it with her Monday to a hearing for David Manilla, the lawyer who has admitted shooting Barry Groh to death on Nov. 29.

After Manilla waived his preliminary hearing on criminal charges from the shooting, Groh's widow displayed the photo for reporters and spoke briefly about her husband of 24 years.

"He was a great man, a great father, and he's going to be missed by a lot of people," she said. "That's hard."

Barry Groh, 52, of Quakertown, was fatally shot in the heart on the first day of deer season. He was standing in a creek bed on land adjacent to Manilla's property when the lawyer shot him with a high-powered rifle from 88 yards away, prosecutors say.

Manilla, 49, of Worcester, has told investigators that he mistook Groh for a deer. He was hunting at the time with his uncle, former Montgomery County District Attorney Michael D. Marino; and a third man.

Manilla said nothing in the brief proceeding before District Judge C. Robert Roth in Richland Township. He is scheduled to be arraigned March 4 in Bucks County Court on three felony firearms charges, involuntary manslaughter, recklessly endangering another person and several hunting violations.

He remains free, having posted 10 percent of his $2 million bail. He and his lawyer, J. David Farrell, had no comment afterward.

The brevity of the proceeding enabled the attention to shift, for one day, away from Manilla and toward Barry Groh and his family.

"We're doing all right," Theresa Groh said. "We are a family. We're hanging together . . . going through everything together, like Barry would want us to do."

Theresa Groh declined to discuss specifics of the shooting, saying she did not want to jeopardize the criminal case or the wrongful death lawsuit she and her two sons have filed against Manilla.

Instead she told of her husband's love of the outdoors, of his zest for hunting and fishing, and of how he shared it with her and their boys.

"He taught the boys and me everything he knew about fishing. We're going to go fishing this year for trout in honor of my husband," she said.

"He was so patient. The boys, he taught them everything since they were little ones."

It was that yen for the outdoors that led Barry Groh to a tract of public land early Nov. 29, where he bagged a large buck with his shotgun. The deer was so large that he called his wife and asked her to send Justin to help him carry it out, court records say.

Meanwhile, Groh dragged the buck to a creek adjacent to Manilla's land, possibly to gut it. He was standing there when Manilla shot him, prosecutors say.

Groh died within a minute of being shot. According to court records, the three hunters waited about 40 minutes before summoning help, failed to tell ambulance workers - who thought Manilla might have had a heart attack - that he had been shot, and took more than a week to give police an full account of what had happened.

Manilla, a lawyer specializing in drunken driving defense, should not have been hunting at all. He pleaded guilty to aggravated assault in the 1980s and, as a convicted felon, is prohibited from possessing firearms.

The rifle he used also is illegal for hunting in Bucks County, where only shotguns and muzzleloaders are permitted.

"We want to get justice for Mrs. Groh," Deputy District Attorney Robert James said after the hearing. Manilla, he said, has been ignoring the law "for years and years, as a convicted felon going hunting every year.

"And this time, this year," he said, "it ended in someone's death."