Saturday, June 10, 2006

The Oregonian
Leopoldo Hernandez Mejia's long run from the law ended in a Multnomah County courtroom Friday when a jury convicted him of murder in the death of a woman in a Northeast Sandy Boulevard motel room 14 years ago.

The nine women and three men on the Circuit Court jury took a little more than a hour to find Mejia, 38, guilty of fatally shooting Tammy Fay Jennings, 32. The woman's mother, brother and aunt wept at the reading of the verdict.

At 10:50 p.m. July 9, 1992, Mejia shot Jennings when she intervened in an argument between a drunken Mejia and his girlfriend, Terri Batson. The couple were living in Room 7 of the Nordic Motel in the 11900 block of Northeast Sandy Boulevard, and Jennings, living in another room of the motel, had befriended the couple a short time before.

The bullet hit Jennings in the left jaw and severed her spinal cord.

Mejia fled Portland for his native Mexico. He was captured in April 2005 when U.S. Border Patrol agents stopped a group of undocumented immigrants near the Silver Bell Mine northwest of Tucson, Ariz. When authorities learned of the outstanding murder warrants in Portland for Mejia, they extradited him to Oregon.

Since his arrest, Mejia has tried repeatedly to fire his lawyers. He made another attempt just before his trial began Monday by filing a federal lawsuit against the defense team. Mejia told Judge Jerome LaBarre that he was illiterate, so another jail inmate, whose name Mejia said he did not know, wrote the lawsuit for him. LaBarre refused to fire the lawyers.

-- Anne Saker




Well thank goodness for the Border Patrol doing their jobs. This was a long wait for this family to have for justice.