Tenney loved nature, friends recall

By Ed Runyan

The victim, a member of YSU’s student government, was killed 23 years ago.

YOUNGSTOWN — With the leaves turning color, this is the time of year Gina Tenney would have loved.

Tenney, who was from Ashtabula, a Lake Erie town the size of Niles, was a sophomore at Youngstown State University when her body was found in the Mahoning River on Dec. 30, 1985.

An investigation by Youngstown police failed to produce enough evidence to charge anyone with killing her until 22 years later, when DNA evidence found in her body pointed an accusing finger at her downstairs neighbor, Bennie Adams.

Over four days last week, prosecutors and defense attorneys questioned investigators about physical evidence gathered in the months after her death and questioned people who saw anything incriminating.

During much of the testimony, the cute, friendly 19-year-old red-haired girl was referred to only in terms of evidence, such as the hairs combed from her scalp and the tissue swabbed from various parts of her body.

At another part of the trial, four of her friends were called to the Mahoning County Courthouse to testify about what Tenney said about Adams and to demonstrate how she felt about him.

The testimony showed that Tenney was afraid of the 28-year-old Youngstown man but remained polite to him even after he started calling her late at night asking if he could come up to see her.

But just when the friends began to talk about Tenney in human terms, some legal issue would arise to stop testimony in its tracks.

During a break in the proceedings, the friends talked to The Vindicator about the “innocent, childlike, funny, sweet and caring” girl they knew.

Because the phone calls made Tenney uncomfortable, she changed her phone number, her longtime friend from Ashtabula, Penny Sergeff, testified.

But on Christmas Day, someone tried to break into her apartment, causing her to call police, which brought Youngstown Detective William Blanchard to her door.

After that, Tenney’s fears deepened, her friends say, and she was afraid to stay at the apartment alone. Neither Blanchard nor her friends, however, were certain as to who committed the break-in.

The last friend who saw her alive was Jeff Thomas, a co-worker at YSU, who saw a movie and ate pizza with her in Niles until around 4:30 p.m. Dec. 29. Tenney and Thomas were student assistants at the university.

In an earlier hearing, the girl’s mother, Avalon, testified to talking to her daughter that evening after she returned home from the movie, asking her parents to come pick her up and move her because of her fears. The 82-year-old woman could not remember such details while on the witness stand last week, however.

The girl may have been killed within a short time of returning to the apartment that afternoon, before she had arranged for someone to come over. A boyfriend who stayed with her the previous night, Mark Passerello, stayed at his apartment that Sunday evening, recovering from some sinus problems.

The fact that she was alone that night may have been a terrible misfortune — one her friends continue to regret to this day. But her being alone that night in her second-floor duplex on Ohio Avenue may have had as much to do with her trusting personality as anything, the friends say.

In addition to the words innocent and childlike used by Sergeff, another important word for her was genuine.

“She didn’t pretend to be someone else,” said Marvin Robinson, who said he was her best friend at YSU. They met when they were freshmen and served in student government together.

“There was no sense of deceiving you,” Passerello agreed. “There was no self-censoring.”

Thomas, who knew Tenney only through the part-time YSU job he and she worked helping incoming freshmen become acquainted with the campus, said she showed self-deprecating humor about herself.

“Every day she would come in, and her hair would be all over,” he said. One day, a co-worker compared her hair to one of the red-haired troll dolls that were popular at the time.

“She said ‘Oh, yeah,’ and she’d taken it good naturedly,” he said.

Such a good-natured attitude seems to have come from her parents, both now in their 80s.

“I cannot imagine him other than smiling,” Passerello said of her father, Lucian Tenney, a retired factory worker originally from West Virginia.

“Even in stressful situations, he puts everyone at ease,” Sergeff said.

The Tenneys say their daughter picked YSU because it offered her a full scholarship. She was 14th in her class at Edgewood High School out of about 250 students, Sergeff said.

Tenney’s friends described Gina as a shy, quiet girl who loved nature.

“People who knew about her knew she had a spiritual side and knew she was very quiet and she was very in love with nature and happy by herself,” said Sergeff, who is a visual artist. “In fact, she said she was very happy as a child all by herself in the backyard looking at leaves and playing.”

Sergeff said losing her friend had a profound effect on her.

“It destroys your life,” she said. “You have to figure out how to go on.”

“There’s a natural order,” Passerello said, of living when you are young and dying when you are old. “It’s a terrible tragedy.”

Part of the healing process for Tenney’s friends involves a lot of “what ifs” regarding Tenney’s being alone that night.

“That’s what we live with every day,” Sergeff said. “We wish we could change it.”

There was confusion that night about who was staying with Tenney, Sergeff said. Sergeff thought it was Passerello. Robinson thought Tenney was going home to Ashtabula.

“You may not have been able to do anything, but I still question myself what things I could have done,” Passerello said.

Looking at the area of Ohio Avenue where Tenney lived in 1985 is a bit deceiving, Robinson said.

Her apartment was just north of the former Rayen School, about 1.5 miles north of the YSU football stadium.

“That was not a bad part of town at the time,” Robinson said. “She rented it off of an old rabbi, and it was very nice.”

Ironically, among the issues of the day among student government members, including Tenney, was the need for more dormitories on campus to provide safer living arrangements, Robinson said.

Today the university has many dormitories, but in 1985, there were almost none. One way the university helped students was to provide escorts, who walked students to their apartments, Robinson said.

Returning to Youngstown for Tenney’s trial has brought back a lot of horrible memories, the friends say.

“And it’s not going to bring her back,” Robinson said. “It’s very hard.”

In the end, Passerello said, he thinks Tenney was primarily the victim of bad luck.

“She had bad luck in her neighbors,” he said.

runyan@vindy.com