Valerie Jenkins, now convicted of manslaughter, gave her suicidal and drunk husband a loaded pistol after an argument in May 2009
BY DAVID OVALLE
DOVALLE@MIAMIHERALD.COM
For handing her drunk, suicidal husband a loaded pistol — which he used to kill himself — a Cutler Bay woman will serve five years of probation.
Valerie Jenkins on Monday pleaded guilty to manslaughter with a deadly weapon for the May 2009 death of her husband, Robert Jenkins, closing a case that had piqued the interest of legal scholars across Florida.
“The important thing to the family of the victim is the admission of guilt and that she is convicted. The issue of jail time was not the main concern,” said Kathleen Hoague, Miami-Dade Chief Assistant State Attorney.
Her defense attorney, James Best, said of her decision to plead guilty: “It’s what she wanted to do.”
Married for seven years, the Jenkinses quarreled frequently. Valerie Jenkins told Miami-Dade homicide detectives that her husband, a mechanic, often talked of suicide.
On the night of May 4, 2009, the couple argued again because Robert Jenkins was not taking his blood pressure medication. Robert Jenkins, who had been drinking beer that night, said again, “he wanted to die.”
According to police, the exasperated woman asked her husband if he wanted his gun. When he said yes, Valerie Jenkins fetched his .22-caliber pistol in a zippered pouch from a dresser drawer and tossed it on the couch where he was sitting.
As Valerie Jenkins walked into the kitchen, she heard a pop. She turned to see her husband slumped over the sofa, with a gunshot wound.
Miami-Dade prosecutors Hoague and Lody Jean said she acted with “reckless disregard for human life.”
On Monday, Best asked Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Leon Firtel to dismiss the case against his client, saying Robert Jenkins’ “independent intervening act” of suicide could not have been foreseen by his wife.
But in preparing its manslaughter case, prosecutors relied on the successful case against Jeramy Ricky Rushing, who in February 1986 gave a cocked, loaded gun to a despondent woman outside a Dania Beach bar.
A Broward County judge dismissed a manslaughter charge against Rushing, but an appeals court later reinstated the case and a jury convicted him. Like Jenkins, Rushing did not receive any jail time but was sentenced to two years of house arrest plus 300 hours of community service.
On Monday, Firtel acknowledged the “mental gymnastics” that the legal case posed for him and legal observers. But he declined to throw out the case, clearing the way for a jury trial.
Jenkins, who faced a maximum of 30 years in prison, decided against trial.
“It’s a difficult case for everybody and it should be resolved,” Firtel said.
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