A 27-year-old woman stood in an Anoka County courtroom and faced Kelly Eugene Jenkins, who wanted her killed after she accused him of sexually assaulting her in 2023.
A jury last month convicted Jenkins, 34, of Anoka, of aggravated first-degree tampering with a witness. After he was arrested and charged with assaulting the woman, he concocted a plot by which she would be lured into a coffee shop to drink coffee laced with fentanyl. He tried to convince his cellmate to carry it out.
“What I experienced was not simply a traumatic event,” the woman told the courtroom at his Thursday sentencing. “It was the beginning of a prolonged nightmare that shattered every sense of safety.”
Kelly Eugene Jenkins (Courtesy of the Anoka County Sheriff’s Office)
Anoka County District Judge Dyanna Street went on to give Jenkins a 6-year, one-month prison term, which was the maximum sentence available, and in doing so added, “The justice system has failed this victim. Repeatedly.”
In December, the sexual assault charges against Jenkins were dismissed. Anoka County District Judge Michele Davis found that his constitutional right to a speedy trial was violated because of a three-month delay caused by the prosecution.
“The length of the delay is presumptively prejudicial, and the unjustifiable reason for it is attributed wholly to the State, the factor which weighs heaviest in the Court’s analysis,” Davis wrote in her Dec. 10 order to dismiss the charges.
Spiked coffee scheme
The woman reported to Anoka police on Oct. 17, 2023, that Jenkins raped her hours before at her apartment. He was less than five months into his supervised release after spending nearly nine years in prison for raping a 16-year-old girl in Oak Grove in August 2013.
She reported that Jenkins asked to come over late at night on Oct. 16 and that she said it was a bad idea because he was on intensive supervised release. He said he wasn’t worried because he had a “burner phone” and couldn’t be tracked. She tried to dissuade him, but he showed up 15 minutes later.
While they were watching a movie, Jenkins began touching and kissing her. She told him they were not going to be intimate, but he forced himself on top of her and raped her despite her repeatedly telling him to stop, the criminal complaint said.
Jenkins was arrested and told police the sex was consensual. He pleaded not guilty and was held at the Anoka County jail without bail ahead of a trial.
Sheriff’s detectives began monitoring his jail phone calls in late October 2023. In one, Jenkins told his ex-girlfriend the woman’s name and said “she needs to recant her statements,” according to the criminal complaint. In another, he told her the woman “needs to understand the severity of this and it’s not a (expletive) game … you understand where I’m coming from?”
Detectives were given screenshots of Facebook messages between the woman and Jenkins’ ex-girlfriend that showed her “attempts to impress upon the victim the severity of the accusations the victim made,” the complaint said.
Detectives were then told that Jenkins was asking inmates at the jail to kill his accuser for money.
Detectives met with his cellmate, who began keeping notes on each time Jenkins would ask him to kill the woman. He told detectives that during the night between December 31, 2023 and January 1, 2024, Jenkins asked him “how he could get this girl to disappear before trial” and believed the inmate would be released in time to carry that out, the complaint said.
Jenkins then told the cellmate the woman’s name and age, and described where she lived and the color of her apartment building. He described the vehicle she drove.
He told his cellmate she “likes to go to coffee” and that he would pay him $3,000 to lure her to a coffee shop and put the powerful synthetic opioid in her drink.
Jenkins admitted to the inmate that he violated his supervised release to go to the woman’s apartment and said that if she disappeared he would do much less prison time, the complaint said.
Escape attempt
Jenkins did not look at the woman as she read her victim impact statement Thursday. He spoke briefly before hearing his sentence, which included credit for 544 days already served in custody.
“I just wanted to say that I apologize for anything that has impacted the person involved in this situation with this case,” he said. “I just …”
“Stop there,” Giancola, his attorney, told him.
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Earlier in the hearing, Giancola told Judge Street they may be filing an appeal in the case and that he had advised Jenkins to exercise his Fifth Amendment right and not participate in a presentence investigation.
Jenkins still must face a probation violation relating to his 2013 conviction, as well as another case he picked up while jailed on the latest sexual assault charges. In July, he damaged a concrete countertop and then used pieces of it to smash a window of his cell and damage the door and walls, according to the charges. He also fashioned a rope out of blankets that measured approximately 35 feet in length.
Jenkins was charged with attempting to escape from custody and first-degree criminal damage to property after causing more than $12,000 in damage. He’s due back in court on the charges Oct. 7.
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