43
Witness describes murder of her ‘best friend’ during Trumbull trial testimony
By Ed Runyan
WARREN
For Melissa Putnam, Sept. 27, 2012, started out pretty well, she testified Monday in David Martin’s murder trial in Trumbull County Common Pleas Court.
Her “best friend,” Jeremy Cole, 21, of Warren, came to her house on Oak Street Southwest and drove her to several places in the morning to apply for jobs, and a temporary service gave her one.
The two were not romantically involved, but she’d known Cole for several years, she said.
After the job search, Putnam and Cole went back to Putnam’s house, where they planned to “hang out” and smoke marijuana.
But a little before noon, David Martin, 29, whom she had known about four months and knew by the name “D,” knocked at her door.
Putnam had sold Martin marijuana in the past, and Martin had been at her home the previous day and was carrying a gun, she said.
The three sat in Putnam’s home smoking marijuana until a point where Martin left the room, then came out of the kitchen pointing his gun at Cole and telling Putnam he had been offered $5,000 to kill Cole.
That’s when a series of events unfolded leading to Cole being executed in Putnam’s bedroom — and Putnam saving her own life by putting her hand behind her head just as Martin tried to execute her in her daughter’s bedrooom, she said.
She played dead after that, said Chris Becker, assistant county prosecutor. Becker told jurors in opening statements that Cole died from being shot between the eyes while his hands and feet were tied behind his back.
After Martin left the home, Putnam left through a bedroom window and knocked on her neighbor’s door seeking help. Eventually the neighbor called 911, and a recording of the call was played in court.
In it, Putnam could be heard telling her neighbor that Martin “tried to shoot me in my head.”
Putnam, who cried several times during her testimony Monday, said the gunshot put her in the hospital for four days and required hand surgery, but her hand still doesn’t close all the way.
She didn’t know until about the time paramedics arrived that there was a bullet lodged in the skin at the back of her head.
“I ran my hand up the back of my head,” she said. “I said, ‘I’m shot in the back of my head.’ How could I live through this?”
The bullet was removed at a doctor’s office a few days after she left the hospital, she said.
Martin could get the death penalty if he’s convicted of killing Cole and other charges called aggravating circumstances, such as kidnapping and committing murder while robbing the victims of money and a phone.
One of Martin’s attorneys, Matt Pentz of the Ohio Public Defender’s Office, admitted during his opening statements to jurors that his client killed Cole and wounded Putnam.
“This isn’t a whodunnit,” Pentz said, adding that there also are very few factual issues in dispute. Martin admitted to police the day he was arrested in Tallmadge that he committed the crimes, Pentz said.
Martin even told members of the U.S. Marshal’s Task Force where they could find the burned clothes he was wearing the day of the crimes and said, “I can accept the needle. I did what I did,” apparently referring to lethal injection by the state.
The gun Martin had with him when he was arrested a couple of weeks after the crime matches bullets at the scene, Becker said.
Prosecutors and defense attorneys knew when they started jury selection last week that Martin’s lawyers were willing to concede guilt, so the most-important thing was to choose jurors who held “middle of the road” views on the death penalty.
Martin was sentenced to 22 years in prison last October in federal court for attempting to sell a firearm to undercover law enforcement officers during the “Little D-Town” investigation in September 2012.
Martin is also accused of participating in a five-hour hostage-taking of a county jail corrections officer in April that ended peacefully.