Lewis County Sirens.com

Deputy Prosecutor Shane O'Rourke addresses jurors as Ronald Brady's murder trial begins in Lewis County Superior Court

By Sharyn  L. Decker
Lewis County Sirens news reporter

CHEHALIS – Prosecutors told jurors yesterday that murder defendant Ronald Brady believed burglars would return to his Onalaska house the night of April 19, 2010 and told his neighbor if they did come back, he planned to shoot them.

Lewis County Deputy Prosecutor Shane O’Rourke told the jury in opening statements it was not a case of self defense; that nobody came through Brady’s garage, broke down a door or crawled through a window.

“Lying in wait in almost total darkness, waiting to trap and kill whoever showed up at his residence that night,” O’Rourke said in his opening statements yesterday morning. “The defendant shot and killed Thomas McKenzie and almost did the same to Joanna McKenzie.”

Ronald Brady

Brady, 60, a retired bachelor, is on trial in Lewis County Superior Court for first-degree murder and first-degree assault.

Fifty-six-year-old Thomas McKenzie of Morton died outside the house Brady owns on the the 2100 block of state Route 508 with a gunshot through his chest.

Lewis County Sheriff Steve Mansfield didn’t arrest Brady, announcing he believed the shooting was justified. His office arrested Joanna McKenzie, wife of Thomas McKenzie, for burglary in connection with their visit to the property that night.

But last autumn, prosecutors filed manslaughter charges against Brady and then upgraded them to murder soon thereafter.

A jury of six men and six women heard from attorneys from both sides yesterday morning and then a handful of witnesses for the prosecution before adjourning at 5 p.m.

Defense attorney Don Blair followed O’Rourke yesterday morning with nearly 30 minutes of an entirely different view of what happened that night.

“A number of things the prosecutor just outlined for you are not true, and, he didn’t tell you the whole story,” Blair said.

Brady, a former computer analyst, was described as beginning that day by doing chores like chopping wood and then leaving to play bridge at a  local church.

He returned in the late afternoon and found not that he may have been burglarized, but he found evidence he had been burglarized, Blair said. And it had happened some five occasions prior, Blair told the jury.

Brady has owned the property for years, but after a fire there, moved into the house next-door, and goes to the property regularly, according to Blair.

A deputy came and took a report and Brady did go home and get his shotgun, but the .22 rifle was already at the house, Blair said.

The Centralia defense attorney went on to say:

It was around 10 p.m. and pitch black out.

“So the burglars returned. They shut their lights out and get their flashlights out,” he said.

His client didn’t know who it was and he didn’t know what their intentions were, Blair said.

“What the prosecutor left out is when Ron opened the garage door, the first thing he did, he wanted to shoot out the tires,” Blair said. “He didn’t want the burglars to get away. It wasn’t he wanted to kill someone.”

Brady just saw two lights shining in his face; he feared for his life, Blair said. It’s not clear how many shots he fired, according to Blair.

“I would say it’s a tragedy Tom died and Ron does feel bad about that,” Blair said. “But looking back, I can’t tell you Ron would do it different today”

Joanna McKenzie took the stand at mid-day, answering questions from Deputy Prosecutor Colin Hayes and Blair.

Joanna McKenzie

Under questioning, the 33-year-old Morton woman said she and husband pulled into the driveway with their headlights turned off and her husband went to knock on the front door.

He returned to the truck, she got out, she said. They both started knocking on the garage door then she went back to the truck and Thomas McKenzie went to the side of the house, she testified.

“A noise, the garage door, got my attention, and then a guy started firing,” she said.

Joanna McKenzie said she heard her husband yell he was shot and saw a person kneeling in the garage.

Nothing was said by the shooter, but “I was screaming something along the lines of ‘stop, what are you doing’,” she testified.

Joanna McKenzie testified that when she took cover behind their truck, she heard the glass in its windshield shot out.

“I believe I was standing at the time, I felt air or something graze my face,” she said.

She said she ran to the road, flagged a vehicle down and called 911.

Not discussed yesterday in any detail was the fact that Joanna McKenzie was convicted last October for attempted burglary from that night. She made a so-called Alford plea, not admitting guilt

The trial resumes this morning and is expected to last all week.

Prosecutors did not say when the neighbor would testify about his or her conversation with Brady.

Defense attorney Don Blair makes opening statements in Ronald Brady's murder trial in Lewis County Superior Court.

Robert McKenzie, 14, spreads some of his father's ashes on Sunday in a rose garden at the church he attends where he lives in Wichita, Kansas. / Courtesy photo by Larry Lane

Law enforcement officers examine the scene of the shooting this morning at the intersection of West Vine Street and Second Avenue in Napavine.

This news story was updated at 10:45 a.m.

By Sharyn  L. Decker
Lewis County Sirens news reporter

NAPAVINE – A Lewis County sheriff’s deputy shot and killed a man early this morning in Napavine.

Deputies were assisting the Napavine Police Department with a call to a burglary in progress, in which a man reportedly armed with a knife was trying to break into a home, according to the Lewis County Sheriff’s Office.

The deputy observed a suspect a short time later; the suspect refused to take his hands out of his pockets and then charged the deputy, the sheriff’s office said in a news release.

The deputy shot the man who was pronounced dead at the scene, according to Chief Civil Deputy Stacy Brown. It happened at 2:12 a.m., according to Brown.

The deceased is a 33-year-old Napavine resident, according to Brown.

The burglary call was on Fifth Avenue Northwest; the deputy was situated “on containment” on Third Avenue Northwest, according to the news release.

A team of outside investigators were on the scene this morning.

The Regional Shooting Response Team is made up of law enforcement officers from the counties of Thurston, Mason, Pacific, Grays Harbor and Lewis, according to Lewis County Sheriff Steve Mansfield.

The investigation into today’s shooting doesn’t include a member from Lewis County, Mansfield said.

The incident began with a call to a house where the man left stab marks through the door and several stab marks on a vehicle; it was some kind of dispute, the sheriff’s office said this morning.

“So somebody’s acting pretty violently,” Chief Brown said.

Napavine Police Department Officer-in-charge Silas Elwood said the house wasn’t randomly chosen; there was a relation between the resident and the man.

Napavine Officer Noel Shields responded to the 911 call, as well at at least two deputies, according to authorities.

The name of the dead man has not been released. His body lay this morning in the street at the intersection of West Vine Street and Second Avenue, several blocks from the targeted house.

Inside yellow police tape were a large white crime investigation van belonging to the regional response team and numerous law enforcement officers.

Nearby neighbor Don Webster said he heard shots in the night, but didn’t think a lot of it.

“I heard gunshots, four, rapid,” Webster said.

He thought it might be someone shooting at animals, like raccoons and didn’t hear more afterward, he said.

The deputy was not injured. His name has not been released.

He has been placed on administrative leave as is standard procedure, according to Mansfield.

The sheriff said it appears the deputy followed protocol, but “that’s why we’re doing the investigation.”

The last time a Lewis County sheriff’s deputy fatally shot someone was in 2002, when Deputy Hal Sprouse shot a man as the two struggled in a ground fight in the Rochester area, according to Brown.

Law enforcement officers examine the scene of the shooting this morning at the intersection of West Vine Street and Second Avenue in Napavine.

By Sharyn  L. Decker
Lewis County Sirens news reporter

Police are looking for a man who robbed a smoke shop on West Main Street in Centralia this evening.

Officers were called about 7:07 p.m. to the business on the south side of the 600 block of West Main Street where a clerk said a male came into the shop, displayed a small handgun and demanded money.

The clerk, who is in her late 20s to early 30s, told police he slammed her head into a door and took all the cash in the till, according to Officer Chris Fitzgerald.

She was alone in the store, Smokin’ J’s Smoke Shop, Fitzgerald said.

The subject left on foot, heading east on Main Street, according to the Centralia Police Department.

The Lewis County Sheriff’s Office K-9 was called to the scene to assist in the search; its track ended in an alley a short distance away, according to police.

The robber was described as about 6 feet tall with a medium build. He was wearing a dark blue or black “hoody” type sweatshirt with the hood up, along with large gold sunglasses and a white baseball cap, according to police.

The clerk thought he might possibly be Hispanic, but she didn’t know, Fitzgerald said.

Police would like anyone with information about the incident to call 911 or the Centralia Police Department.

Barb Thompson answers news media questions after the hearing in the state Court of Appeals in Tacoma.

By Sharyn  L. Decker
Lewis County Sirens news reporter

TACOMA – The new Lewis County coroner and Barb Thompson – mother of former state trooper Ronda Reynolds whose 1998 death in Toledo remains under scrutiny – were at the state Court of Appeals in Tacoma yesterday as three judges pondered the case.

Former Lewis County Coroner Terry Wilson’s appeal of a 2009 judge’s order to remove suicide from Reynolds’ death certificate remains active, even though newly elected Coroner Warren McLeod has indicated he wants to revisit the cause and manner of death.

Ronda Reynolds

The case was the subject of a judicial review in Lewis County in November 2009 after which a panel of citizens concluded then-Coroner Wilson’s determination that Reynolds’ died of suicide was arbitrary, capricious and incorrect. A judge ordered Wilson to change the manner of death, but Wilson appealed.

A panel of three judges heard from attorneys on both sides yesterday in downtown Tacoma.

The 2009 judicial review was unprecedented and Thompson wants to see its scope expanded while the coroner’s office lawyer has been fighting to see it narrowed.

“I think one of the reasons we’re here today is to try to clarify the law,” Thompson said.

Her lawyer, Royce Ferguson, wants a judge to be able to decide more than that a coroner’s decision was wrong.

“If it’s not suicide, what is it?” Ferguson said. “And if it’s homicide, who changes (the death certificate)? The judge? The coroner? The prosecutor?”

Olympia attorney John Justice, who was hired by the Lewis County Prosecutors Office to represent Wilson, told the three appeals judges yesterday that’s beyond the scope of any case law.

Thompson has been vigorously questioning her daughter’s death – believed by the Lewis County Sheriff’s Office to be suicide – for more than a dozen years.

The 33-year-old woman was found with a bullet in her head and covered by a turned-on electric blanket on the floor of a closet in the home she shared with her husband of less than a year, Ron Reynolds, the principal at Toledo Elementary School

Even though one of McLeod’s first acts after he took office in January was to change Reynolds’ death certificate from suicide to undetermined – and then he announced he wanted to hold a coroner’s inquest – he put that on hold as the appeal works its way through the system.

It could be months before the Appeals Court rules, according to Ferguson.

And yesterday, the justices questioned how any decisions they might make could apply to the new coroner, as he is not named in the case.

“My question is, is anything we do going to have any meaning at all?” Judge David Armstrong said during the proceedings.

Judge Joel Penoyar encouraged both sides to agree to substitute McLeod’s name for Wilson’s in the appeal.

McLeod spoke afterward, saying he has to consult with his attorney before deciding what he may or may not do but the way he sees it, he inherited the case.

Ideally, he still wants a coroner’s inquest, McLeod said. And he’s starting to question his inclination to hold it in another county, and to entirely turn the proceedings over to an outside coroner, he added.

It needs to be resolved, it’s gone on too long, McLeod said.

“I want to see the truth come out, I want to see this case resolved finally,” he said. ” For Barb, for the citizens of Lewis County.”
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Watch KOMOtv.com’s video from the Appeals Court here

Lewis County Coroner Warren McLeod listens to Ronda Reynolds' mother after the hearing in the state Court of Appeals in Tacoma.

By Sharyn  L. Decker
Lewis County Sirens news reporter

CHEHALIS – Attorneys yesterday confirmed they are ready for trial next week in the case of the Onalaska man who allegedly shot at two suspected burglars outside his house last year, killing one of them.

Ronald A. Brady, 60, is charged with first-degree murder in the death of 56-year-old Thomas McKenzie of Morton and first-degree assault for allegedly opening fire on McKenzie’s estranged wife Joanna McKenzie as she fled.

Ronald A. Brady

Brady has pleaded not guilty.

The trial in Lewis County Superior Court is expected to last about five days.

Deputy Prosecutor Colin Hayes however indicated to the judge yesterday there were still last minute negotiations going on, which may or may not lead to a plea agreement and no trial.

Hayes is handling the case with Deputy Prosecutor Shane O’Rourke. Centralia defense attorney Don Blair represents Brady.

The lawyers met with Judge James Lawler yesterday afternoon to sort out the ground rules for trial, including how much and how to characterize Joanna McKenzie’s presence at the property that night.

She has made a so-called Alford plea, not admitting guilt, to attempted burglary.

According to charging documents: On April 19, Brady reported somebody had broken into his house he had been renovating on the 2100 block of state Route 508, moving items stored in his garage. He saw a back window had been broken and found the garage door opened about two inches.

Brady returned to his nearby rental home where he lived, collected his .22 caliber rifle and 12-gauge shotgun and then went back to his unoccupied house on state Route 508. He told sheriff’s detectives he was staying there in case the burglars returned

He described to deputies hearing noises, opening his garage door and finding two flashlights shined in his face; then he opened fire.

Thomas McKenzie died from a gunshot wound to his chest and leaves behind nine children and other family members.

Lewis County Sheriff Steve Mansfield announced last summer he believed the shooting was justifiable and he wouldn’t arrest Brady.

In September, the Lewis County Prosecutors Office charged Brady with first-degree manslaughter for Thomas McKenzie’s death and two months later upgraded the charge to first-degree murder, “based on the facts of the case.”

Among the witnesses listed are, for the defense, private investigator Jerry Berry; and for the prosecution, Brady’s neighbor Jack Tipping,  Joanna McKenzie, a fire chief, a pathologist and several sheriff’s deputies.

Brady’s defense is general denial and self defense, according to documents filed in his case. He remains free on a $50,000 unsecured appearance bond

First-degree murder is a class A felony with a possible penalty of life in prison and a $50,000 fine. Its elements include intent and premeditation.

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Read background on the case, here