Lonnie Franklin Jr. Photo via LAPD
Jurors being asked to recommend the sentence for the man convicted of the “Grim Sleeper” murders of nine women and a 15-year-old girl heard emotional testimony Friday from some of the victims’ relatives, with two women saying they have constant reminders of their slain sister despite the passage of nearly a decade since her killing.
“Not only was she a part of our family, she still is a part of our family,” one of Janecia Peters’ sisters, Javonna Latrell Peters, told jurors in the penalty phase of Lonnie David Franklin Jr.’s trial.
“She’s here with me all the time … She’s in my heart every day. She’s a part of me,” the woman said, with her voice breaking.
She said that the two were born 11 1/2 months apart, shared a bedroom and were best friends. She told jurors that she was devastated about learning that her sister’s body had been found on New Year’s Day 2007 and that she thinks she cried for about an hour straight and may have blacked out afterward.
Another of Peters’ sisters, Shamika Smith, said the 25-year-old woman is “constantly in our thoughts, our minds.”
She said Peters was raising a son who’s now 14 and now has three mothers — two aunts and a grandmother — instead of four mothers.
“That’s because one of his mothers is missing,” she said. “I can hug him and kiss him, but I’m not his mother.”
She said her nephew’s face reminds her of her slain sister and makes it seem like a “little piece of Janecia is there.”
The woman’s mother, Laverne Peters, described her youngest daughter as her “sweetheart baby.”
“I have a very hard time even thinking about when I did find out (about her death),” she said, while noting that she couldn’t wallow in her pain and had to wait to cry until after her grandson had gone to bed.
“I couldn’t just lay down and let it be over for us,” the victim’s mother said. “She had a son.”
Alicia Alexander’s older sister, Anita Limbrick, testified that she was shocked, in disbelief, saddened, horrified and angry about learning that her sister had been found dead in 1988, and that she still remains horrified about what happened to her 18-year-old sibling.
Limbrick, who was in the sheriff’s academy at the time of her sister’s killing, said it was hard to be in court as photographs of her sister’s body were shown.
She said she found it “hard to believe that anyone could do anything like that, but I had to see for myself” to help to get closure because she had never been allowed to see her sister’s body.
“I think of good times. I try to think of the good times,” she said, when asked how she remembers her sister.
She noted that her sister loved to sing and once recorded herself singing over a song on an Anita Baker cassette tape.
“Now I’m happy I have it. I was yelling at her at the time,” she recollected.
Jurors had heard Thursday from Alexander’s parents and brother, along with relatives of three of the other victims as prosecutors seek to have them recommend that Franklin be executed instead of serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole.
The penalty phase of the trial of Franklin, a 63-year-old former Los Angeles city garage attendant and sanitation worker, who was convicted May 5 of 10 counts of first-degree murder, began on Thursday.
The seven-woman, five-man jury also found Franklin guilty of the attempted murder of Enietra Washington, who survived being shot in the chest and pushed out of a moving vehicle in November 1988. In testimony Feb. 25, she identified Franklin as her assailant.
In her opening statement in the trial’s penalty phase, Deputy District Attorney Beth Silverman detailed for jurors a series of other killings she said are linked to the defendant. Jurors had not heard that evidence during the guilt phase.
Silverman told jurors that the gun used to kill Peters — the final victim in the charged “Grim Sleeper” killings — was also used in the January 1984 shooting death of 21-year-old Sharon Dismuke, a crime for which Franklin was not charged. The weapon was found during a July 2010 police search of Franklin’s property, Silverman told jurors.
“This was the first murder in a series of murders committed by the defendant,” Silverman said of Dismuke’s killing, telling jurors that the same gun being used was “like bookends on this series of murders.”
The prosecutor also described a series of other killings in which Franklin is suspected, including the shooting death of Georgia Mae Thomas, who was found dead Dec. 18, 2000, in South Los Angeles, with two gunshot wounds to the left side of her chest and blunt-force trauma to her head.
The weapon used in Thomas’ killing was found at Franklin’s home, and his fingerprint was found on a magazine of the gun used to kill the 43-year-old woman, the prosecutor said.
Franklin is also suspected in the killing of 28-year-old Inez Warren, who was found Aug. 15, 1988, with a gunshot wound to the left side of her chest and blunt-force trauma to her head, Silverman said.
A kit used to collect potential DNA evidence from the woman was inadvertently destroyed in 2000 — years before Franklin’s arrest — but the killing bore the “same pattern or signature” as the other killings, the deputy district attorney said.
The prosecutor also told jurors that a high school ID card — which belonged to 18-year-old Hawthorne High School senior Ayellah Marshall, who vanished in January 2006 — and a Nevada ID card belonging to 29-year-old Rolenia Morris, who disappeared in September 2005, were found by police in Franklin’s garage during a July 2010 search. Authorities have not been able to locate either woman, Silverman said.
Franklin, while serving in the U.S. Army in Germany in 1974, joined with two other men to grab a 17-year-old girl off a street, gang-rape her and take photos of her, the prosecutor told jurors.
Franklin’s attorney declined to present an opening statement at the start of the penalty phase.
In closing arguments last week, the defense lawyer contended that an unknown assailant may have been responsible for the 10 killings for which Franklin was prosecuted.
The prosecutor countered that there was no evidence to support the defendant’s theory and told jurors that “the only DNA profile that repeats itself again and again is the defendant’s.”
Jurors deliberated about 1 1/2 days before finding Franklin guilty of the killings, which occurred between 1985 and 1988 and 2002 and 2007, with the assailant dubbed the “Grim Sleeper” because of what was believed to be a 13- year break in the killings.
Franklin was convicted of killing:
— Debra Jackson, 29, found dead from three gunshot wounds to the chest in an alley on Aug. 10, 1985;
— Henrietta Wright, a 34-year-old mother of five who was shot twice in the chest and found in an alley with a cloth gag stuffed in her mouth on Aug. 12, 1986;
— Barbara Ware, 23, shot once in the chest and found under a pile of debris and garbage in an alley on Jan. 10, 1987;
— Bernita Sparks, 26, shot once in the chest and found in a trash bin with her shirt and pants unbuttoned on April 16, 1987;
— Mary Lowe, 26, shot in the chest and found in an alley with her pants unzipped behind a large shrub on Nov. 1, 1987;
— Lachrica Jefferson, 22, found dead from two gunshot wounds to the chest — with a napkin over her face with the handwritten word “AIDS” on it — in an alley on Jan. 30, 1988;
— Alicia Alexander, 18, killed by a gunshot wound to the chest and found naked under a blue foam mattress in an alley on Sept. 11, 1988;
— Princess Berthomieux, 15, strangled and discovered naked and hidden in shrubbery in an alley in Inglewood on March 9, 2002;
— Valerie McCorvey, 35, strangled and found dead with her clothes pulled down at the entrance to a locked alley on July 11, 2003; and
— Janecia Peters, 25, shot in the back and found naked inside a sealed plastic trash bag in a trash bin in an alley on Jan. 1, 2007.
Franklin has remained jailed without bail since his arrest in July 2010 by LAPD Robbery-Homicide Division detectives.
–City News Service
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