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Two plead guilty in Winona homicide
By Joe Gorman
YOUNGSTOWN
As 18-year-old David Jenkins was escorted out of his courtroom Wednesday after pleading guilty to a homicide last August and Darnell Wilkerson, also 18, was being brought in to plead guilty to the same crime, Judge Lou A. D’Apolito stood up behind the bench and threw up his hands.
“What a waste of a life. What a waste of a life,” he repeated.
The judge was lamenting the youth of Jenkins and Wilkerson and the victim, 17-year-old Shawn Cortez, who was killed during a brawl Aug. 17, 2014, on Winona Drive.
Jenkins pleaded guilty in Mahoning County Common Pleas Court to charges of involuntary manslaughter, aggravated riot, aggravated assault and a firearms specification.
Assistant Prosecutor Martin Desmond and defense attorney Corey Grimm agreed on a sentence of 15 years with Jenkins having to spend nine years behind bars before being allowed to ask for early release.
Desmond said Jenkins is the person who fired the shot that killed Cortez.
Jenkins, who was 17 at the time of the crime, will get credit for the year he has spent in prison since he was arrested.
Wilkerson pleaded guilty to charges of aggravated riot and involuntary manslaughter.
He faces a recommended sentence of four and a half years in prison.
Sentencing will be at a later date.
Plea negotiations were also ongoing with Jenkins’ brother, Dejon Jenkins, 19. All three were set for trial Monday. The three are the last of 15 people who were charged for their roles in the death of Cortez.
David Jenkins had originally been charged with murder but Desmond said he did not think a jury would convict because there is evidence that David Jenkins did not intend to kill anyone that day.
“It doesn’t fall under the scope of a purposeful killing,” Desmond said.
Grimm said he and co-counsel Greg Rossi spent two hours Tuesday explaining the deal and the ramifications of rejecting it to David Jenkins, and Judge D’Apolito said plea negotiations got heated Wednesday morning, including some shouting at one point between the lawyers. When asked by the judge, David Jenkins said in a soft spoken voice that he had graduated high school and his grades were “excellent.”
Wilkerson was arrested in February for the crime when he was just 17 and indicted by a grand jury last week. His attorney, David Engler, told the judge Wilkerson is a cousin of the Jenkins brothers and Wilkerson’s mother was on the verge of moving her son out of Youngstown just before Cortez was killed.
“She was going to move to Cleveland within a week [of Cortez’s death],” Engler said.
Cortez was killed during a prearranged fight that was set up by text message and Facebook after a fight the day before between two families. The two groups had been arguing for more than a year.
Cortez was in a home on Winona Drive with other people when the other group came onto the street looking to fight. At first that group left, then was challenged in the street to fight by the group Cortez was in. That group ran after the first group, and several shots were fired, one of which struck Cortez.
The entire sequence was captured on video by two women who also pleaded guilty for their roles in the death of Cortez.