Man convicted in Lantana-area woman's murder takes stand to testify against her husband
WEST PALM BEACH — A West Palm Beach man who pleaded guilty to shooting and killing a woman in her Lantana-area home in June 2017 took the witness stand Friday to testify against the man prosecutors say orchestrated the crime.
Joevan Joseph told a jury that Euri Jenkins agreed to pay him $20,000 in exchange for killing Jenkins' pregnant wife, Makeva Jenkins. Joseph said a mutual acquaintance arranged the "money play," a term he used to describe the murder-for-hire killing.
Joseph testified as a state's witness on the second day of the trial of Euri Jenkins, who is charged with first-degree murder.
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Joseph described how he and the other men began "brainstorming" ideas of how to kill Makeva, including discussions about either targeting her at work or staging an attack to make it look as though Makeva and Euri were both targets.
He spoke of seeing Makeva at one point while visiting the Jenkins' home and recognizing that she was the person he was to kill.
“I don’t know what the plan was at the time,” Joseph, 24, said Friday during direct examination from Chief Assistant State Attorney Adrienne Ellis. "There were still a bunch of scenarios in place."
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Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office investigators said Joseph, who was 19 at the time, shot 33-year-old Makeva Jenkins in the head as she lay in bed on the morning of June, 29, 2017. Prosecutors say Euri Jenkins, now 35, wanted his wife dead so that he could cash in on a $500,000 life insurance policy. He later learned he was not the beneficiary of the policy.
Authorities said Makeva Jenkins told her husband in the days before her death that she wanted a divorce.
Joseph, who was indicted on a first-degree murder charge, pleaded guilty in 2019 to a lesser offense of second-degree murder in exchange for agreeing to testify against Jenkins. He sentencing was deferred pending his testimony. He faces a minimum of five years in prison and a maximum of 20.
The man authorities say introduced Joseph to Jenkins, Dametri Dale, 23, pleaded guilty in November to a manslaughter charge in exchange for cooperating with prosecutors.
Joseph and Dale each took the witness stand Friday, with Dale resuming testimony that began Thursday.
In his opening remarks, defense attorney Gregg Lerman raised questions about the credibility of both men, telling jurors that both had made statements during the course of the investigation that were inconsistent and untruthful.
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On Friday, Lerman asked Dale about the phone conversations that Dale secretly recorded between himself and Euri Jenkins in the months after Makeva Jenkins' death. Lerman played recordings of the conversations, in which Jenkins could be heard denying being involved in the killing and telling Dale to encourage Joseph not to cooperate with investigators.
During one testy exchange, Dale reiterated his testimony from Thursday that Euri started the discussion about killing Makeva. “Euri Jenkins is the one that initiated all of it because no one would have thought to kill Makeva if didn’t come from his mouth,” Dale said.
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Joseph testified for less than an hour late Friday afternoon before Circuit Judge Kirk Volker ended the proceedings for the day and allowed the jury to leave for the weekend. Joseph is scheduled to return to the witness stand Monday morning.
Under questioning from Ellis, Joseph told jurors that Jenkins paid him $10,000, intending that he would be paid with the remaining half after he completed the task of killing Makeva. He was paid about the same time that he went to the Jenkins house with Dale and saw Makeva for the first time, he said.
jwhigham@pbpost.com
@JuliusWhigham
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Hitman says he was promised $20K to kill man's pregnant wife
