Mark Clawson and Carol Braun of Wayland, parents of a Knoxville woman who died in 2023, have filed suit in Knoxville, Tenn., alleging that her husband killed her.
The parents insist Sharon Shanks died under questionable circumstances and they have accused her husband, Dr. Ryan Henry Shanks, an emergency medicine physician, was responsible for her death in January 2023. Braun and Clawson seek $20 million in compensatory damages and $40 million in punitive damages against Ryan Shanks.
The lawsuit insists, ”Sarah Shanks was trying to escape an unhappy marriage. She was continuously emotionally abused and subjected to the whims of her tyrannical, controlling, and manipulative husband who mistreated her, threatened her, terrorized her, and abandoned her before eventually killing her.”
Ryan Shanks has not been charged by Knoxville authorities in the case. Knoxville police said they looked into Sarah Shanks’ death, and the Knox County district attorney general reviewed the case.
Sarah Shanks, 41, died Jan. 29, 2023, nine days after being admitted to a hospital. Before then she’d led an active, healthy life, the lawsuit states.
The suit maintains that the couple, who had two children, had been having marital problems and she was seeking a divorce. The complaint alleged he had been abusive and controlling.
Ryan Shanks called 911 on Jan. 23 , reporting that his wife had fallen ill at the home. He said she’d had a panic attack.
Her parents say she was in excellent health at the time.
The lawsuit maintains that her husband would later tell a Knoxville Police Department investigator that his wife had a drinking problem.
“At one point, a friend was asked to come to the Shanks’ home to mediate an argument between Sarah and (Dr. Shanks). Sarah confronted the defendant about telling her friends that she had a drinking problem, hid alcohol around the house, or put alcohol in drinks at the kids’ ballgames.,” the lawsuit says. “Ultimately, the defendant admitted that he had lied and Sarah did not ‘hide’ alcohol as he had claimed.”
The suit alleges that Dr. Shanks claimed his wife had six glasses of wine along with two Ambien pills the night of Jan. 19 before she fell ill.
The suit goes on to say that about 1:30 a.m. Jan. 20, the husband would later tell someone that Sarah Shanks came into his bedroom, calling him by their son’s name and relaying that she said she’d fallen and hurt her neck.
She then woke him up a second time, saying she couldn’t breathe, which led him to report by 2:32 a.m. to 911 that she was having a panic attack, the lawsuit states.
When first responders arrived at the home, they found her “lying alone and non-responsive in the driveway of the Shanks’ home.” She had an abnormally low heartbeat.
She went into cardiac arrest, and EMTs started CPR. They took her to the hospital, where she did not regain consciousness and was pronounced dead the afternoon of Jan. 29.
Medical staff began to suspect Sarah Shanks had been hurt much earlier than her husband had reported, the lawsuit states.
“ER staff then contacted the KPD to investigate.”
The forensic center examined her body because of concerns “for acute drug overdose and suspicious circumstances,” the lawsuit states. But because some of her organs had been donated, authorities weren’t able to reach a thorough conclusion about her cause of death. Ms. Shanks donated her organs to five people, three in Michigan.
District Attorney General Charme Allen decided not to prosecute Ryan Shanks.
According to the parents’ complaint, the DA acknowledged in writing to KPD that the death was “highly suspicious” and Ryan Shanks “was the only adult with her in the hours prior to the unexplained medical event that led to her death…”
Allen also noted the circumstances of the couple’s marriage before her death.
But the prosecutor concluded that considering the autopsy was inconclusive “as to both cause and manner of death” experts couldn’t come up with a certain opinion. “
Besides alleging the killing was intentional, her parents insist it was negligent that Ryan Shanks failed to properly care for his wife when she was in the midst of a “medical emergency.
Ms. Shanks was a 1999 graduate of Wayland High School and she earned a bachelor’s degree from Gramd Valley State University.
