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Court hears of victim’s anxiety
Photo
Bennie Adams
The strangulation victim expressed fear of the suspect before her death in 1985.
YOUNGSTOWN — In the final days before her death by strangulation almost 23 years ago, Gina Tenney expressed her fear of Bennie L. Adams, her mother and her close friends testified.
Speaking during a court hearing Friday, Tenney’s mother, Avalon Tenney of Ashtabula, said her daughter expressed fear of Adams on “the very evening when she was killed” and asked her parents to come and pick her up.
“I couldn’t go get her because my husband had the car,” Tenney said. Tenney testified her daughter said: “I’m in the wrong place.”
In response to questions from Judge Timothy E. Franken of Mahoning County Common Pleas Court, Tenney testified: “That meant the guy that had moved in downstairs was maybe torturing her in some manner through speaking to her.”
The prosecution maintains that Adams made several telephone calls to Tenney, after which she would immediately contact her parents or a male friend to express her fear of Adams, whose actions caused her to change her telephone number and install additional apartment door locks.
Adams, 51, of Hollywood Avenue, whose jury trial will begin Oct. 6, is charged with aggravated murder with a death-penalty specification in the Dec. 29, 1985, death of Tenney, a 19-year-old Youngstown State University student who was Adams’ upstairs neighbor in an Ohio Avenue duplex.
Tenney’s body was found floating in the Mahoning River near West Avenue on Dec. 30, 1985. Adams was indicted last fall after a DNA match was found in evidence police had preserved for 22 years.
Martin P. Desmond, assistant county prosecutor, said Avalon Tenney was the last person, other than Adams, who is known to have spoken to her on the night of her death.
“He started calling her repeatedly so she was upset and worried so she changed her phone number,” Penny Sergeff, a friend of Tenney’s, said, referring to Adams. Sergeff said Tenney expressed her fears of Adams to her several times in December 1985.
Tenney reported Adams once called her very late at night around Dec. 15 and tried to make small talk with her, but she said she was tired and wanted to go to bed, so she hung up, Sergeff testified.
“He was calling her, and he was staring at her,” Sergeff said of Adams.
“She mentioned her concern about a man who lived downstairs. She didn’t specify by name, but she did express great concern” and apprehension, said Jeffrey Thomas, another friend of the victim’s.
“During the course of our conversation the day before her death and the day of her death, she had gone back to the subject several different times and brought up her concern,” Thomas recalled.
Another friend of Tenney’s, Marvin Robinson, who was a fellow YSU student, testified Tenney called him several times, saying she was upset immediately after calls she received from Adams, expressing her “anxiety, anxiousness, anger and frustration.”
Tenney reported Adams would ask why she didn’t invite him upstairs to her apartment, Robinson testified. “It was: ‘Why is it happening? Why wouldn’t he leave her alone? When is it going to stop?,’” Robinson said.
The frequency and persistence of Adams’ calls increased in late October 1985 after Tenney broke up with her boyfriend, Robinson reported. “He was asking her, ‘Well, why isn’t your friend coming around anymore?,’” Robinson said Tenney reported to him.
Robinson said Tenney showed him a card she found under her door, which was signed “Bennie” and addressed “to a confused young lady.”
Tenney said she was afraid of Adams, especially after her apartment was broken into Dec. 25, 1985, Robinson said.
On Friday, Judge Franken, who will preside over the trial, conducted a hearing to screen hearsay evidence the prosecution sought to admit in Adams’ trial concerning Tenney’s “excited utterances” and expressions of fear of Adams during her final days.
After the hearing, the judge approved the admissibility of the prosecution’s hearsay evidence.
With limited exceptions, hearsay is inadmissible in court. Excited utterances are among the exceptions.
The judge overruled a prosecution request to admit into trial evidence Adams’ 1986 conviction for the robbery, kidnapping and rape of a Boardman woman, for which he served 18 years in prison.
Judge Franken said that incident wasn’t sufficiently similar to the allegations in the Tenney case to show a pattern of behavior and that its introduction would be too prejudicial to the jury.
Judge Franken said he would rule next week on the admissibility of Tenney’s ATM card, which police said they found Dec. 30, 1985, in Adams’ jacket, which was lying on his apartment floor.
Defense lawyers Lou DeFabio and Anthony Meranto said that item came from an illegal warrantless search, but Desmond said it came from a proper search in conjunction with an arrest.
Judge Franken announced that the court has received 96 completed questionnaires from potential jurors for Adams’ trial out of 325 mailed out Aug. 28, and the judge said that number is sufficient for a pool of potential jurors for the trial.