Defense Denies Guilt As Grim Tale Opens Trial
The four daughters of Banita Jacks: N'Kiah, left, Aja, Brittany and Tatianna. They had been dead for at least seven months when their bodies were found. (Wjla (Channel 7))
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/15/AR2009071503690.html?sid=ST2009070603102
By Keith L. Alexander
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Banita Jacks had a secret in her upstairs bedrooms, a secret so terrible that she spent most of 2007 trying to convince the world that she had moved away from her Southeast Washington home, a federal prosecutor said yesterday. For months, the prosecutor told a judge, Jacks kept her blinds drawn, let mail pile up outside the house, stopped paying bills and left by the back door.
“Her secret was the rotting bodies of her daughters. And that secret unraveled when the marshals arrived on Jan. 9, 2008,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Deborah Sines said in her opening statement at Jacks’s murder trial in D.C. Superior Court.
When the federal marshals, who were there to serve an eviction notice, forced their way into the rented rowhouse, they found the bodies of Jacks’s four daughters — Brittany Jacks, 16, Tatianna Jacks, 11, N’Kiah Fogle, 6, and Aja Fogle, 5 — in two upstairs bedrooms. Jacks said the girls had died in their sleep.
In the defense’s 20-minute opening statement, one of her public defenders, Lloyd Nolan, said that although his client lived in the house, she was “completely innocent” of killing the girls. “This was a tragic event,” Nolan said. “But Ms. Jacks was in no way responsible for the death of her children.”
Nolan said the only evidence linking Jacks to the girls’ deaths was that she was at home when the marshals arrived. Nolan said that no witness saw or overheard Jacks kill her children and that no scientific evidence linked her to their deaths.
Judge Frederick H. Weisberg will decide the case because Jacks has waived her right to a jury trial. She is charged with 12 counts, including premeditated first-degree murder and cruelty to children. Because of the ages of the victims, Jacks, who rejected an insanity defense, faces life in prison without parole.
The bodies were so badly decayed, Sines said, that prosecutors had to consult with four medical examiners, including one from the Department of Defense, FBI specialists and a forensic anthropologist to determine the causes of death. Eventually, authorities declared that Brittany had suffered puncture wounds to her abdomen, Aja had been strangled and beaten, and the two other girls had been strangled.
Nolan disputed the prosecution’s assertions about the causes of death, saying the bodies were too badly decomposed to make a determination of cause or time.
During Sines’s opening statement, Jacks, 35, dressed in a navy-blue prison jumpsuit, often shook her head and pursed her lips. But she kept her eyes forward, away from Sines. As was the case at earlier hearings, Jacks was an active participant in her defense. She wrote notes or used a yellow highlighter to communicate with her attorneys, who sometimes whispered to ask whether she had additional questions.
Sines spent most of her opening describing the girls’ bodies and the home. All furniture, food and other household staples were gone, she said. In one bedroom, the bodies of the three youngest sisters, each dressed in a white T-shirt, were lined up in order of age. A “couple pairs of tiny flip-flops” were the only other things in the room, she said.
Sines said medical examiners determined that Brittany was killed first. Brittany’s nude body was found in a pool of blood in another bedroom. A T-shirt had been placed over it. Sines said the decomposed body was “melting into the floor.”
Sines said it appeared that Brittany had been held hostage in the room because the door was locked from outside with a key that Jacks kept on top of the door frame. A bedsheet covered a bedroom window that overlooked an alley. Feces and urine were found in the closet.
“She wouldn’t even allow her own teenager out to use a bathroom,” Sines said of Jacks.
The prosecutor said she plans to call as witnesses relatives, friends, the children’s godparents, social workers and neighbors who will testify that Jacks verbally abused Brittany or that she withheld food from the children as punishment. Sines said one of Jacks’s friends even drafted a custody agreement, hoping to take Brittany out of Jacks’s home.
Authorities say they think Jacks began isolating her children from friends and family as early as April 2007, when she had Brittany’s cellphone disconnected. “By April 3, no one talked to Brittany again,” Sines said. Then, through the summer, neighbors saw three, then two, then one child outside with Jacks.
Before the trial began, Weisberg spent three days watching eight hours of videotape of Jacks being interrogated by D.C. detectives. During the interviews, Jacks spoke of her children as “having demons” and referred to herself as Mary Magdalene and to her dead boyfriend as Jesus Christ. Weisberg ruled that the videos could be used in the trial.
The first witness was Deputy U.S. Marshal Nicholas Garrett, who was assigned to carry out the Jan. 9 eviction. Garrett said Jacks answered the door wearing only a white T-shirt and a white head covering. She spat on the ground and wouldn’t let him and the other marshals in, he said. After the marshals pushed the door open, Garrett said, he had to cover his face because of the stench.
“It smelled like rotting meat, like stink bait,” he said. “I just thought it was rotten or spoiled food.” After finding the bodies, the marshals ordered Jacks out of the house and handcuffed her.
In Rare Display, Jacks Moved To Tears as Mother Testifies
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/16/AR2009071604163.html?sid=ST2009070603102
By Keith L. Alexander
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 17, 2009
Banita Jacks broke into tears during her trial in D.C. Superior Court yesterday, the first emotional outburst she has had in more than a dozen court appearances since her arrest last year on charges of murdering her four daughters.
Jacks, 35, sitting next to her two attorneys, began crying after her mother, Mamie Jacks, was called as a witness by Assistant U.S. Attorney Deborah Sines. Within five minutes of taking the stand, Mamie Jacks was asked to identify two large poster-size family photos of Jacks’s daughters that Sines pulled out.
The first showed the oldest daughter, Brittany Jacks, 16, smiling and posing with several of her friends in school. The second was a school picture of the three other sisters, Tatiana Jacks, 11, N’Kiah Fogle, 6, and Aja Fogle, 5, posing and smiling together with their hair in braids and dressed in white polo shirts.
As Sines walked to the witness stand to show Mamie Jacks the photos, Banita Jacks began to cry, covering her face as tears rolled down her cheeks. Minutes later, Judge Frederick H. Weisberg called for a five-minute recess, and Jacks was escorted out of the courtroom to a holding cell.
On the morning of Jan. 9, 2008, Banita Jacks was arrested after federal marshals came to her rented, two-story rowhouse in Southeast Washington to evict her. When they arrived, they found the bodies of the four girls in two upstairs bedrooms. Jacks is charged with 12 counts, including premeditated first-degree murder and cruelty to children. Because of the ages of the victims, Jacks, who rejected an insanity defense, faces life in prison without parole if convicted.
The trial, now in its fifth day, is expected to last another week. Yesterday, the girls’ grandmothers and other family members who were called as witnesses described Banita as a caring, attentive mother who became distant after her live-in boyfriend, Nathaniel Fogle Jr., died in February 2007 after a long battle with cancer.
At times, Mamie Jacks contradicted what her daughter told police. She said her daughter dropped out of school in Charles County in the 10th grade, not the sixth grade, as Banita Jacks had told police. Mamie Jacks said her daughter left school when she was 17 and was pregnant with Brittany.
According to testimony and previous accounts from family members, Jacks and Nathaniel Fogle met in 2000 when she was working as a hair stylist and Fogle would go to her to get his hair done in cornrows. In 2005, Jacks and the girls moved in with Mamie Jacks in Waldorf after they were evicted from their home. Fogle would come to the house and visit Jacks and the girls. Mamie Jacks said she wouldn’t allow Fogle, who is the father of the two youngest girls, to stay at the house with them, only to visit. Once Jacks caught Fogle in Banita’s bedroom and ordered him out.
“I told him he had two seconds to get out of my house,” Mamie Jacks testified. Banita told her mother that if Fogle couldn’t stay there with her and her daughters, she would leave.
Banita then cut off communication with her mother. The last time she saw her was at a family gathering in 2005. Mamie Jacks said she didn’t know where her daughter was living or whether her grandchildren were in school. But she said she had no reason to believe the children were in danger. Yet, in 2006, she said she called the Charles County social services department to check on the girls. She did not explain why she made the call. The next time Mamie Jacks heard from her daughter was in a phone call from the D.C. jail after Banita’s arrest.
“She took excellent care of Brittany and all of the children,” Mamie Jacks said on the stand, holding onto her pocketbook as it rested on her lap. Occasionally, she glanced over at her daughter.
“I never saw her mistreat the girls, and the girls never complained about her mistreatment,” she said.
Fogle’s mother, Jessie Fogle, said Banita Jacks became more distant when her son’s illness progressed and he checked into George Washington University Hospital Center and then a hospice.
When Fogle called Jacks to tell her that doctors said her son’s death was imminent, she urged her to bring the girls to the hospital to say goodbye. She said Jacks, who told police that she did not trust hospitals or doctors, lashed out over the phone. “What did they do to him? He was all right when he left here!” Fogle said Jacks yelled at her.
Fogle said Jacks did not attend her son’s funeral, and other family members said Jacks did not tell her daughters that Fogle had died.
Fogle said that in the months after her son’s funeral, she stopped by the house on Sixth Street SE several times and called to check on her grandchildren, but Jacks either would not answer the door or would call and tell her not to come by again. A week before the marshals came to the house, Fogle called Mamie Jacks, saying she could not find Banita Jacks and wondering whether she had heard from her or the children.
Both grandmothers and other relatives said Jacks, who was receiving child support payments and food stamps, never asked them for money or help. “If she had, of course I would have helped her,” Fogle said.
Both grandmothers have filed civil lawsuits against the District for failing to prevent the deaths of the children.
Boyfriend of Jacks’s Daughter Tells of Last Time Seeing Her
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/17/AR2009071702919.html?sid=ST2009070603102
By Keith L. Alexander
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, July 18, 2009
The last time Leepoy Kelly saw his girlfriend Brittany Jacks, she was standing in the front yard of her Southeast Washington rowhouse watching him walk towards the bus stop.
In a steady and calm voice yesterday, Kelly told a D.C. Superior Court judge that it had been about a month since he had seen Brittany at Booker T. Washington Charter School, where they were freshmen. So one morning in March 2007, he decided to check on her. Brittany didn’t seem like herself. “She looked a little sad,” he said, shaking his shoulder-length dreads out of his face.
Prosecutors called Kelly, now 17, to testify at the murder trial of Brittany’s mother, Banita Jacks, to help establish when the eldest of Jacks’s four daughters was last seen or heard from. Jacks was arrested Jan. 9 after federal marshals serving an eviction notice on her rowhouse on Sixth Street found the bodies of her daughters, ages 5, 6, 11 and 16, in two upstairs bedrooms. Authorities say they had been dead for about seven months.
Prosecutors say Jacks fatally stabbed Brittany and strangled and beat her younger sisters to death; Jacks says the girls died in their sleep. If convicted, she faces life in prison.
Kelly testified yesterday that Jacks opened the door when he visited, then called to Brittany inside the house. When Brittany emerged, Kelly said, he grabbed her and pulled her to him for a hug as he leaned against a railing on the front stoop.
Jacks kept the door cracked open, and Kelly remembered hearing Brittany’s three little sisters playing inside the house. After about 15 minutes, Jacks told Brittany it was time for Kelly to leave. He testified that he hugged Brittany, told her he loved her and began walking down the street. As he looked back, he saw her watching him from her front yard. It was the last time he saw or spoke to the girl he often referred to as his “baby.”
In the days and weeks after, Kelly testified, he tried calling Brittany on her cellphone. It was off. He tried contacting her through Brittany’s MySpace account. No response.
Before the bodies were discovered, Jacks told school social workers who also visited the house around that time that she was home-schooling Brittany and her sisters.
Other prosecution witnesses yesterday were Jacks’s former neighbors, who each testified that they had smelled a foul odor during summer 2007. Some suspected it was a dead rat.
About May 2007, they saw Jacks take all the furniture out of the house and put it in the back yard. She started losing weight and told one young neighbor, Darrius White, 17, that she had cancer. White testified that because his house shared a common wall with Jacks’s home, he heard Brittany and Jacks arguing on the stairs one evening. White took food and water to Jacks’s house in late 2007 but did not go into the house. Jacks took it in through her back door.
White testified that Jacks often came to his home to ask for water and cigarettes. Terilynn Louden, another neighbor, testified that Jacks took Louden’s young daughter along with her own children to McDonald’s in March 2007. Louden said Jacks’s girls were always “clean and their hair was always done” in barrettes and tiny braids.
A month later, when she saw Jacks’s youngest children again, they were wearing white T-shirts and “white rags” on their heads. Louden testified that she bought juice for Jacks at a nearby grocery store and gave her cigarettes. Jacks told Louden that her food stamps had run out but that she didn’t wanted to apply for more because of all the paper work, Louden testified.
The trial will resume Monday.
Decomposition Made M.E.’s Job Difficult
Cause of Oldest Daughter’s Death Debated
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/20/AR2009072002987.html
By Keith L. Alexander
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
A District medical examiner told a D.C. Superior Court judge Monday that Banita Jacks’s oldest daughter’s body was so badly decomposed that he was only about “50 percent” sure that she had been murdered.
In the fourth day of Jacks’s trial, Assistant Medical Examiner A. Wayne Williams said that when he did an autopsy on Brittany Jacks’s body shortly after it was found on Jan. 9, 2008, initially he could conclude only that the cause of death was “suspicion of foul play.”
Williams said that during the autopsy, he found three puncture wounds to Brittany’s abdomen, which were “highly likely” to have been stab wounds, but he was unclear whether the wounds were enough to kill her. “This was a very tough case, very complicated. It doesn’t fit the textbook,” he said.
Under cross-examination by Jacks’s attorney, Peter Krauthamer, Williams said that if Brittany had been stabbed to death, it was unusual for there not to be any blood spatter on the walls or ceiling of the bedroom where her body was found. But that could have meant that she bled internally, Williams said.
Authorities ruled that Brittany, 16, and her three sisters — Tatianna Jacks, 11, N’Kiah Fogle, 6, and Aja Fogle, 5 — had been dead for at least seven months when their bodies were found by federal marshals who came to evict the family from the Sixth Street SE rowhouse where they lived. Jacks said the girls died in their sleep, one by one. Authorities said that Brittany was stabbed and that the three youngest girls were beaten and strangled.
Jacks is charged with 12 counts, including premeditated first-degree murder and cruelty to children. She faces life in prison without parole if convicted.
Prosecutors spent much of Monday arguing over how Brittany died and the condition of her body.
One of the poster-size photos used in the trial showed Brittany’s body appearing almost mummified, lying flat on the floor with her arms extended above her head. Brittany weighed about 46 pounds and was about 5-foot-5. A knife was also found near her body. After reviewing the deaths of Brittany’s younger sisters and consulting with his colleagues, Williams said he was then about “99 percent sure” Brittany’s death was the result of a homicide.
Krauthamer tried to raise concerns about Williams’s conclusion being influenced by the national media attention to the case or the fact that Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) visited the coroner’s office during the investigation and eventually fired six D.C. social workers who had contact with the Jacks family. Williams said no outside factors influenced his findings.
Krauthamer also tried to challenge the testimony of a Capitol Heights woman whom Jacks and her family lived with for about four months in 2006 after they were kicked out of a homeless shelter.
LaShawn Ragland, a friend of Jacks’s boyfriend Nathaniel Fogle Jr., told Assistant U.S. Attorney Michelle Jackson that she watched Jacks and Fogle sitting around and laughing as their two youngest daughters, N’Kiah and Aja, who were ages 4 and 3 at the time, smoked marijuana.
But during Krauthamer’s cross-examination, Ragland acknowledged that during her Jan. 16, 2008, grand jury testimony, just a week after Jacks was arrested, she did not mention the marijuana use by the girls. “I wasn’t asked,” she said.
Ragland also testified that she watched how Jacks and Brittany would argue and how Jacks would withhold food from Brittany as punishment and isolate her from her sisters.
FULL COVERAGE OF THIS STORY FROM THE BEGINNING
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/linkset/2009/04/14/LI2009041401281.html?sid=ST2009070603102
