Prosecutors focus on Renfro clothing

By RALPH BARTHOLDT

Staff Writer

COEUR d’ALENE — The plastic case containing the defendant’s clothing is more than 5 feet high and looks like a museum piece.

It is plaintiff’s exhibit No. 29 in the first- degree murder trial of Jonathan D. Renfro, a slightly unwieldy piece deputy prosecutor David Robins carries Friday across the well of the Coeur d’Alene courtroom like a piece of panelboard, so jurors can have a look.

Behind the cellophane and against a white background is displayed a black jacket, flattened, with sleeves splayed. Below it, a black pair of trousers, each pant leg pressed and angled toward the bottom of the panel.

The display appears antique, a sinister set of clothes forever relegated as evidence.

The clothes were last worn by a gunman walking west on a dark sidewalk May 5, 2015, the night Sgt. Greg Moore was on patrol during the graveyard shift in a quiet Coeur d’Alene neighborhood.

Renfro, 29, faces the death penalty for shooting Moore once in the face with a 9 mm pistol, killing him.

A day earlier, deputy public defender Linda Payne objected when the clothing was first carried into the well.

“It makes (Renfro) look big,” she said.

The defendant stands about 5-foot-9, she said.

Standing more than 6-foot-1, Moore was taller than Renfro and weighed more than 275 pounds, according to testimony.

The clothes on display are seen in several police videos including footage from Moore’s body camera recorded moments before he died as he spoke with Renfro prior to a bang and then darkness. The clothing items appear in surveillance videos taken at the Hayden Walmart where Renfro was seen a couple hours before the homicide occurred 1 and a half miles away in a Sunshine Meadows neighborhood.

Renfro was dropped off there, and was reportedly seen leaving a pickup truck and walking into Walmart after using a large dose of methamphetamine, according to prosecutors.

Renfro told detectives after his arrest that he took meth the night of the shooting.

“He took it like Alka-Seltzer,” Robins said.

Renfro is seen wearing the clothing in a Stateline Walmart surveillance-camera video after stealing Moore’s car and ditching it near the store’s entrance on West Pointe Parkway. He wears the clothing following his arrest around 3 a.m., seated in the back seat of Deputy Eric Silva’s sheriff’s office SUV, when Silva asks, “Where did you hide the guns?”

Renfro hesitates.

He didn’t have them, he tells the deputy. A person named Davis, who Renfro claimed was part of the Aryan Brotherhood, a man he knew from prison, has the guns. It is the same story Renfro will tell detectives during his interrogation, later that night.

He was hanging out with Davis, and Davis killed Moore, he will tell them.

On Friday, the fourth day of Renfro’s trial, the large, plastic display case was again carried into the well and placed before jurors, its clothing nefarious and odd-looking.

The left jacket pocket contains a hole, a detail pointed out by prosecutors.

The star-shaped hole was pierced by a hollowpoint bullet shot from a firearm inside the pocket leaving a spray of burned and unburned gunpowder embedded in the fabric like dust.

“It is consistent with a gunshot from the pocket,” Stewart Jacobson, an Idaho State Police forensic scientist, told the court Friday. “When a handgun in an enclosed area is pressed against a piece of fabric … it will get stellate tears.”

Chemical tests of the hole showed lead and powder residue.

“The damage of the suspect’s jacket is concurrent with a firearm being fired in the pocket,” Jacobson said.

On the night of the shooting, Renfro wore a pair of black, block-heel, logging boots. The leather boots, bulky, but almost petite in shoe size, were held before jurors during testimony this week, before being packed away for another time and another witness.

Included in this week’s testimony, Deputy Chardelle Ellis, a digital expert at the Kootenai County Sheriff’s Office, told jurors she had collected the cellphones Renfro carried May 5.

He allegedly tried contacting friends, asking for help as he raced from the crime scene at 2820 W. Wilbur Ave. where officers and medics tried to revive Moore.

“He was texting friends, trying to get away,” Robins told the jury.

Ellis said she turned the cellphones over to state police for forensic testing. The messages and conversations will appear next week as evidence for the state.

Friday’s last witness had interrogated Renfro a month before Sgt. Moore’s death. The Post Falls police detective asked Renfro about a stolen firearm that people on the street said Renfro kept tucked in a holster on his belt.

It was a 9mm Glock stolen from a glovebox, and because Renfro is a convicted felon, he is prohibited from carrying a gun, the detective reminded Renfro.

In footage from a Post Falls Police Department interrogation room, taken a month before Sgt. Moore was shot, Renfro is seen sitting awkwardly in a chair pressed between a table and wall.

“I don’t want to bust your chops,” Detective Bob McDonald tells Renfro, who is dressed in jeans and a T-shirt.

Renfro told the Post Falls investigator he heard the stolen firearm was in Spokane. He does not have it.

“If I find out where it is, I’ll call you, man,” Renfro says in the video. “One thing I don’t want to do is get near a firearm.

“Every bullet in that gun is worth five years,” he said.

The murder trial in First District Court will resume Monday at 9 a.m. in the old courthouse at 501 Government Way.