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DEFENSE TAKES TURN AT STAND ON SECOND DAY OF MURDER AND ROBBERY TRIAL

By Ray King/OF THE COMMERCIAL STAFF
Thursday, March 8, 2007 10:50 PM CST

The defense will get to tell its side of the story today when the second day of testimony begins in the second trial of a Pine Bluff man charged with capital murder and aggravated robbery.

Timothy O’Guinn is accused of being involved in the Aug. 10, 2004, slaying of Patrick Mickens, 19, whose body was found in a vehicle on the parking lot of an apartment complex on Miramar Drive. O’Guinn has pleaded innocent.

His first trial last August ended in a mistrial after jurors told Judge Berlin Jones they were hopelessly deadlocked 6-6.

Prosecutors contended O’Guinn, who was 21 at the time, and three teenagers planned to rob Mickens of marijuana they knew he had because one of the teenagers had bought drugs from Mickens earlier in the day.

“At first we were going to buy it but then we decided we were just going to take it,” said Roderick Fells, who pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and aggravated robbery on July 13 and is serving a 30 year prison sentence for his part in the death.

Fells was 16 at the time.

O’Guinn and Fells reportedly approached the car where Mickens sat.

“I said give me what you got,” Fells testified in court Thursday. “I cocked the shotgun to scare him and it went off.”

“You shot Patrick?” asked Chief Deputy Prosecutor Kyle Hunter, who is representing the state with Deputy Prosecutor Rik Ramsey.

“Yes,” Fells replied, going on to say that after the shooting, he and O’Guinn ran back to his vehicle where the other two youths were waiting and all of them left the scene.

Fells said he gave O’Guinn a .32-caliber pistol that didn’t have a clip in it, but did have one round in the chamber.

“Timothy told me to give him the shotgun because I might do something crazy but I said, ‘I got it,’” Fells said.

The other two teenagers, Andra Omar Wilkins, who was 15, and Antonio Donte Murphy, who was 17, both pleaded guilty to robbery in 2006 and were each sentenced to 10 years in prison.

On cross examination by Pine Bluff attorney John Kearney, Fells denied a claim by another teenager, Justin Thomas, who said Fells had showed him a shotgun at a basketball court earlier in the day, and talked about “hitting a lick,” which means committing a robbery.

Thomas said Fells pulled up in a car and “told us to come look. Nobody asked Fells about the gun, he just showed it.”

Another teenager, Demetrius Griffin, who was with Mickens at the time of the shooting, admitted that the two of them had gone to the apartment complex to sell marijuana.

“I seen two people walk up,” Griffin said. “One said drop it off and I saw what looked like a 12-gauge.”

After the shooting, Griffin said he jumped out of the window of Mickens’ vehicle, ripped his shirt when he got hung up on a fence, then ran home where his sister called police.

“She saw the blood on my face and started calling people,” Griffin said. “I told her Patrick had been shot.”

Before the state rested Thursday afternoon, Dr. Charles Kokes, the chief medical examiner for the state Crime Laboratory said Mickens’ death was the result of a shotgun wound to the head.

“The initial entry was on the left temple, close to the hairline and internally damaged the front of the skull and the brain,” Kokes said. “The manner of death was homicide.”

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