Prosecutor tells jurors to convict ‘nice young lady’

By Ed Runyan

runyan@vindy.com

WARREN

Jurors in Trumbull County Common Pleas Court went home without reaching a verdict Thursday in the Regan Jelks involuntary- manslaughter trial. They will resume deliberations this morning.

During closing arguments, Chris Becker, assistant prosecutor, acknowledged that the young woman on trial “looks like a nice young lady.” But he said “sympathy” for her should not be a factor in deliberations.

Instead, they should look at the law, which says if a person gives the keys of her car to a person with two guns, and a short time later, he dies at the hands of a police officer while reaching for one of those guns, she has aided and abetted him in the conduct that got him killed.

In this case, it was her boyfriend of two years, Taemarr Walker, 24, of Warren, who died in an Oct. 19, 2013, confrontation with a Warren police officer after Walker disobeyed multiple commands from the officer and pulled a gun out from under the front seat of Jelks’ car.

“She doesn’t have to touch the guns. She didn’t have to put them in [the car], but she did everything else except put them in there,” Becker said. “She let [Walker] drive the car. She let him put the handguns in the car.”

In addition to involuntary manslaughter in Walker’s death, she’s charged with improperly handling firearms in a motor vehicle, which prohibited her or Walker from having firearms within their reach.

In order to convict Jelks of involuntary manslaughter, a felony punishable by up to 11 years in prison, the jury must find her guilty of the firearms offense and determine that the violation of law led to Walker’s death.

Ronald Yarwood, one of the attorneys for Jelks, also touched on the demeanor of the 22-year-old, reminding jurors of her emotional state during most of her three hours of questioning by police several hours after the shooting.

She was interviewed five times — three by agents with the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation and twice by Lt. Jeff Cole of the Warren Police Department “over hours and hours and hours after watching someone shoot a gun right past her face, shattering the glass on her, killing her boyfriend,” Yarwood said.

Officer Michael Krafcik got nine days to recover from the trauma of the event before he had to give an interview to investigators, Yarwood noted.

“She was taken without any time to reflect upon what happened, to digest, to decompress, to get her wits together,” Yarwood said, adding, “And this is [what] they want to take out of all of those hours, they want to pick and choose some inconsistencies” in her story.

“She was crying so much, [the investigator] couldn’t even understand some of the things she was saying,” Yarwood said, adding that Jelks agreed to speak to investigators without a lawyer, but they ignored her request to go home and continue the interview later.

“I’m just ready to go home now. Call me. You all know where I work. You know my number,” she said.

Becker said the fact that Jelks initially said she didn’t know anything about Walker’s guns — but later admitted seeing him with one — suggests she knows more than she has said.

Also suggestive is the fact that she denied knowing that Walker was wearing latex gloves — even though she was only a few feet away from him as he drove her car, Becker said.

But Yarwood countered that it was dark on Risher Road, where Walker died. And because they were arguing, she may not have been looking at him.