Trial's testimony and videos detail Renfro's activities

In her brief opening statements in the murder trial of Jonathan D. Renfro, deputy public defender Linda Payne wanted the jury to know the defendant did not act with forethought when he shot and killed Coeur d’Alene Police Sgt. Greg Moore two years ago.

She described her client as a wayward kid whose impulsiveness put him behind bars.

Renfro, 29, faces the death penalty if jurors in the trial, which has lasted 5 1/2 days so far, find him guilty of first-degree murder.

Prosecutors rested their case last Tuesday and the defense will not present its case until 9 a.m. today because expert witnesses were not available before then.

So far, prosecutors showed Renfro spent the day before Moore’s death getting high with friends.

He used his Ford pickup to transport a lawnmower to the house on A Street in Coeur d’Alene belonging to a woman named Suzy, who was disabled. Separated from the Ironwood shopping center by a fence, her property was unkempt and overgrown. The woman — who has since died — allowed Renfro’s friend, Jennifer Doane, to stay at her residence in an effort to help Doane get off drugs. In return, Doane cared for the woman and her property.

Doane, an inmate at the Idaho Department of Correction after being convicted earlier this year of drug possession, testified to injecting Renfro with meth about 12 hours before Moore’s death.

Prosecutors showed that on the evening of May 4, 2015, Renfro drove from A Street to the Hayden Walmart, where some of the store’s 284 cameras recorded the pickup truck entering the lot, followed Renfro as he left the truck, and recorded him walking south alongside the store’s west wall before encountering Moore more than an hour later in the Sunshine Meadows subdivision.

Footage from Moore’s patrol car camera and body camera were played for jurors leading up to the gunshot that killed the officer.

The body cam showed a scruffy Renfro wearing glasses and a dark jacket telling Moore he had nothing else in his pocket besides cigarettes and a lighter. Moore asks him to be honest. They are the officer’s last words.

Sunshine Meadows resident Christopher Wertz was awakened at 1:26 a.m. by his wife, who said she heard a gunshot. Wertz went to the back porch of his home at 2820 W. Wilbur Ave. for a look. Near the intersection he saw a police car with its lights on. There seemed to be no one around, Wertz told jurors.

“There was no people, no sound,” he said.

Wertz walked to the front lawn and saw a man. The body camera of the now-lifeless officer showed Renfro leaning over him stealing Moore’s sidearm, magazines and flashlight.

“What’s going on?” Wertz yelled.

The man turned to look at Wertz, and then, “He hopped inside the cop car and sped past me as fast as it could go.”

Wertz saw Moore’s body lying in the street and walked toward it.

“I was standing in the middle of the street,” he said. “Close enough to see a badge.”

He yelled for his wife to dial 911.

Behind the wheel of Moore’s patrol car, Renfro turned off the police radio and stepped on the gas. He tried to turn off the overhead lights. He texted his friends as he headed west to a pre-decided “safe spot” to be used in a time of trouble.

Prosecutors showed video of Moore’s stolen car traveling west at 90 mph when it passed an eastbound Post Falls patrolman at 1:43 a.m. on Seltice Way, and eventually losing the pursuing Post Falls officer.

“It had such a distance on me, I couldn’t see where it went,” Officer Chris Thompson said.

Thompson found the empty car west of Beck Road on west Point Parkway, not far from another Walmart near the state border with Washington.

After 2 a.m., Kootenai County K9 Deputy Jason Shaw and two Post Falls policemen walked into the night west of Walmart with Bari, a Dutch shepherd on a 30-foot leash. The dog zeroed in on Renfro hiding in framework of a semi truck trailer parked in an empty field between Walmart and Cabela’s.

Once the dog attacked Renfro, it took 45 seconds for officers to pull Renfro from the framework and onto the ground because his foot was stuck.

The next day detectives found and removed Moore’s sidearm and magazines from Renfro’s hiding spot.

In footage from the interrogation room of the Kootenai County Public Safety Building on the morning after his arrest, Renfro wore stripes and was without his glasses.

“My, I-can’t-see-right-now glasses,” Renfro tells detectives.

Investigators asked him what route he took to get from Sunshine Meadows in Coeur d’Alene, to the Walmart Superstore near Stateline, where he was arrested.

“Prairie all the way,” Renfro mumbles. Then adds that he turned on “Chase, or something like that.”

For two hours he tries to implicate someone named Davis, waffles, tells detectives there is no one named Davis, then returns with statements such as, “Yes, there really is a Davis … He was not with me when this happened.”

Davis contacts him by “(Putting) little notes in my cigarette pack.”

He tells detectives he took Moore’s gun not to shoot it out with officers, but to protect himself from animals in the wild.

Kayla Best, a former girlfriend, was among people Renfro contacted via text messages as he fled the scene in the early hours of May 5. She promised to fetch Renfro, but after turning on the police scanner realized he was surrounded and gave up the effort.

“We were friends,” Best told the jury last week.

Was she trying to help him elude law enforcement? Prosecutors asked her.

“Yes, I was,” Best said.

When Renfro befriended her a year earlier, he bragged about his prowess with a firearm and promised to take her shooting. But, he bragged a lot, she said.

When he obtained a stolen Glock, he made an effort to show Best, and bragged about the gun’s power and how the hollow point bullets he had for it could “put a hole in anything.”

That was a week before Moore died.

When Payne asked Best, who is pregnant and on probation for a felony drug conviction, to expound on she and Renfro’s relationship, she said Renfro was a gentle man.

“You told police that he wasn’t a monster, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“He really brags a lot about stuff, right?” Payne asked. “He’s not really a big guy in the circle of friends, is he?”

“No.”

“You told police in a million years, he wouldn’t do this?”

“Yes.”

“You told him you loved him and you still support him, right?’

“Yes.”

Renfro told detectives on the morning after allegedly killing Moore that he was looking for a motorcycle to steal, but he had walked past many motorcycles and vehicles and not stolen or burgled anything.

“Why did I not take a vehicle?” he asks himself.

“And the answer is…?” A detective asks.

“I tried to figure out… a motivation to leave everyone and everything … get back to being an invisible person.”

The trial resumes at 9 a.m. today in Courtroom 1 of the old Kootenai County Courthouse.