Defense team focuses on Renfro's life

COEUR d’ALENE — An expert defense witness on Tuesday outlined the web of lifelong influences that worked in concert to develop the man who stuck a loaded pistol into the face of a Coeur d’Alene policeman two years ago, pulled the trigger and killed him.

For more than four hours Dr. Mark Cunningham, a Seattle clinical forensic psychologist hired by Jonathan D. Renfro’s attorneys, enlightened the jury in Coeur d’Alene’s First District Court to an array of adverse or impairing factors that disposed the defendant to a life of crime.

Using a Department of Justice template that outlines risk factors that lead to criminal behavior, the former Navy psychologist and lecturer applied the components to a young J.D. Renfro as he grew up in the safe environs of Paso Robles, Calif., and later, in Rathdrum, Idaho.

But before his testimony Tuesday, the defense called relatives and friends of the Renfro family who corroborated that as a boy the defendant had an almost idyllic homelife.

One at a time, as the women were called to the stand, aunts, a cousin and young J.D.’s den mother from his time in the Scouts spoke of a rambunctious boy, who was caring, who brought home and nurtured wild animals, who always looked out for the wellbeing of others and who lived in a safe and loving home.

None of the four witnesses called before the mid-morning break could comprehend what had gone so wrong for the boy and young man they once knew, to be convicted in Idaho of murdering a policeman — Coeur d’alene Police Sgt. Greg Moore — and sitting in a trial where jurors contemplated the death penalty.

“I was shocked,” Connie Callahan, Renfro’s Cub Scout den mother said. “I was devastated. I would never have imagined it, no.”

Describing a young Renfro as kind, and a boy who always helped others, Imperil B. Hancock, an aunt from Northridge, Calif. was also shocked.

“It was heartbreaking,” Hancock said. “It was definitely not the boy I used to know.”

The boy she often played with was always in good spirits, funny and full of energy.

None of the morning’s first witnesses conceded that the Renfro household, in which young J.D. grew up, had its dark sides.

When Cunningham was called to the stand before noon, the professorial psychiatrist, in horn-rimmed glasses and a clipped beard, brought a few fat binders to the stand.

In his the many hours of interviews since being hired by the defense more than a year ago, Cunningham filled 18 similar binders, he said, with records that include health and school records, juvenile detention records, transcripts of interviews with inmates, Renfro’s friends, relatives, neighbors, detention officers and teachers.

What Cunningham painted for the court was a picture of a family that suffered from a hidden dysfunction starting with Renfro’s father, Terry, a Vietnam veteran who had been exposed to large amounts of Agent Orange, which can result in physical impairment in offspring, Cunningham said.

“Dyslexia, difficulty reading, math, language processing, writing …are overrepresented in Vietnam veterans,” Cunningham said. “Agent orange impacts chromosomes of the father.”

Terry was a man who was quick to anger, who had poor hygiene and a distaste for authority. He was often drunk according to neighbors, was careless, mercurial and irresponsible.

What a young Renfro did not have at home, and what he needed for a strong psychological foundation was a father figure, Cunningham said.

“A positive same sex role model ... someone who (he could) emulate and be like.”

Renfro’s mother, Carol, a woman who worked two jobs and who, according to neighbors, may have been in an unhealthy relationship with her spouse, was often distracted and irritable.

“(Carol) was observed to be volatile and verbally abusive to her own children,” Cunningham said.

The young boy suffered emotional abuse at the hands of his father, and often failed to come home. One of the incidents resulted in his first arrest as a runaway after the family moved to Idaho.

Grandparents on both sides of the family were alcoholics, which lends itself to a predisposition, something that was exhibited in Renfro’s early encounters with alcohol. By the time he was in his late teens, according to friends, J.D. suffered from the shakes each morning, “until he drank his first beer,” Cunningham said.

Cross examination by prosecutors begins today on the third day of the final phase of Renfro’s murder trial in First District Court.