FORMER HARDING COACH Jury selection begins in murder trial

One excused juror said she heard 'so many rumors' after Deana Jenkins died.
By ED RUNYAN
VINDICATOR TRUMBULL STAFF
WARREN -- Jury selection got under way Monday in the murder trial of David Jenkins, the former Harding High School girls basketball coach accused of killing his wife, Deana, in May 2004.
Judge Peter Kontos agreed to a defense motion asking that the jury pool of 55 people be divided into two groups: jurors who had heard about the case and those who had not.
By the end of the day, Assistant Prosecutor Chris Becker and defense attorney J. Gerald Ingram had questioned 18 jurors who said they had heard about the case through the press or in other ways.
More interviews
Five of those were excused. Some of them agreed that their knowledge of the case might make it difficult for them to render an impartial verdict. The 17 others in that group will be interviewed this morning before normal jury selection begins around 1 p.m.
Judge Kontos also ruled on two other motions: one related to hearsay evidence, granting the prosecution the right to use statements attributed to the victim regarding her desire to leave her husband or move up the timetable for divorcing him.
And in the other, the parties agreed that the prosecution would not use evidence relating to medical information about David Jenkins. The prosecution reserves the right to question him, however, about such matters if it comes up in testimony by the defendant, Becker said.
In questioning, most of the prospective jurors said they were aware of the case through news accounts at the time of the death. Most of them said they had also read or heard news accounts over the weekend indicating that Jenkins was going on trial this week.
Excused jurors
One juror who was excused from the case said she recalled from news accounts that, "When he murdered her, he put her in the closet."
She added that such information might well be hard for her to forget when it came time to deliberate on a verdict.
Another juror who was excused said her niece played basketball for David Jenkins at Harding and that after his wife died, "I heard so many things. You just hear so many rumors," she said.