Friends recount events surrounding slaying

Deana Jenkins had bruises on her face and a chipped tooth, a friend said.
By ED RUNYAN
VINDICATOR TRUMBULL STAFF
WARREN -- Deana Jenkins' close friend and co-worker Bernadette McElroy and other friends had an uneasy feeling about the relationship between Jenkins and her husband, David, before they found her lifeless body in her daughter's closet May 20, 2004.
First, Mrs. Jenkins told McElroy earlier that day, during a break at work for the Child Support Enforcement Agency, that she had told her husband the night before that she was leaving him.
"She said, 'I told him that I was going to leave.' She was uneasy. She wasn't herself," McElroy told the jury Thursday during the first day of testimony in David Jenkins' murder trial in Trumbull County Common Pleas Court.
McElroy said she stopped at the Jenkins house on Clearwater Street around 5:45 p.m. to drop off CDs and found Mrs. Jenkins at home with her husband. It took a minute or two for anyone to answer the door.
Mrs. Jenkins was still in her work clothes and was making dinner. She and her husband were having what David Jenkins termed a "family discussion," McElroy said, indicating that he appeared to be bothered that McElroy was there.
"I asked her if she was OK," McElroy said, adding that Mrs. Jenkins' answer was yes. "She was adamant that she would call in 30 minutes."
Were supposed to meet
McElroy left there to begin shopping for a party she and Mrs. Jenkins were planning for the following weekend. Mrs. Jenkins was supposed to join her in the shopping later that evening after supper.
McElroy never received that phone call and spent about an hour shopping at various locations before she received a call from a friend, Carol Brown, who told McElroy about a phone call from Mrs. Jenkins to another friend, Toni Heller, around 6:30 p.m., indicating she needed help at home.
"I said, 'Something is wrong. Get to the house immediately ... even if you have to break in the house,'" McElroy said she told Brown. McElroy then dropped all of the items she was buying in the store. "I took off running. I took off on the way to the house," McElroy said.
Other friends -- Heller, her husband, Neil Heller, and Karen Osborne -- converged on the Jenkins house looking for Mrs. Jenkins but could not find her, and went to area hospitals and elsewhere, McElroy said.
Son found body
The friends returned to the Jenkins house around 8 p.m. and started searching again, finding Mrs. Jenkins' purse in a garbage can in the back. David Jenkins was at the house at the time, and friend Karen Osborne asked him: "What did you do to her?"
David Jenkins said, "Why are you blaming me?"
McElroy said Osborne just kept asking the question over and over.
The friends and the Jenkins' son, Durrell, 20, went through the house more thoroughly after that and found Mrs. Jenkins' body in the closet of her daughter's bedroom.
"Then you hear Durrell say, 'My mommy, my mommy.' I just screamed back: 'Your mom's where?'" McElroy said.
"He said, 'In the closet.'"
McElroy went to the bedroom.
"She looked like she had been beaten up, bruised," McElroy said. "She had bruises all over her face, her tongue had been bitten, her tooth chipped, blood in her nostrils."
At the hospital later, David Jenkins cried, and said, "My wife. I love my wife," McElroy said.
Went to friend's aid
When Toni Heller received the call from Mrs. Jenkins, it shook her up enough that she dropped what she was doing and drove at a high rate of speed toward the Jenkins house, calling anyone she thought might be able to help.
"It was Deana, and she was saying she needs help right then," Heller said as she took the witness stand after McElroy. "I said, 'Deana?' And she said, 'I need help at the house now.' I said, 'Deana, did he hurt you?' And the phone went dead."
Heller was just dropping off her children at a track meet at Austintown Fitch High School when Mrs. Jenkins' call came. "I just drove off and I was trying to tell her I was on my way. I left my kids at the track meet," she said, breaking down. Judge Peter Kontos ordered a recess in the proceedings so Heller could compose herself.
Others got to the Jenkins house first, but Heller was the first to make it inside because the doors to the house were locked. She climbed onto a metal railing in the back of the house and pulled open a bathroom window to get inside. Mrs. Jenkins was not found, so they left to search area hospitals and other places, she said.
Return to house
Heller also testified that when the friends and family returned to the Jenkins house later, David Jenkins tried to keep them from the inside of the house. It was around that time when Heller lifted the lid on a garbage can in the back yard and found Mrs. Jenkins' purse, which Heller said had been on a bed when Heller was in the house the first time.
"He [Jenkins] kept saying, 'That's my wife's purse,'" Heller said. Jenkins wanted the purse, but Heller said, "I wouldn't let him have it."
Heller described the scene around 8:30 when Durrell Jenkins and Heller found Mrs. Jenkins' body in the closet. Durrell "was so angry, he just smashed the door and Deana just kind of flopped out," Heller said. Durrell caught his mother in his arms, and he and Heller held onto her. Because the body was still warm, Heller tried to revive her with CPR.
DNA testing
The first witness in the case was Shawn Weiss, associate technical director for LabCorp, the company that did DNA testing on fingernail clippings the Warren Police Department delivered to the North Carolina laboratory.
Weiss said the clippings, presumably from Mrs. Jenkins, indicated that DNA on them was from either David Jenkins or a male blood relative of his. The degree of accuracy of the testing was 95 percent surety that the DNA could have come from less than 1 percent of the population, Weiss said.