The man allegedly dug a three-foot<\/a>, unmarked grave on the side of a rural Napa County road and placed Jamari Madkins, the boy he is suspected of killing, inside. They then drove to the East Bay.<\/p>\nThe then-17-year-old girl, identified in court records as Jane Doe, returned to the life she\u2019d known she was first trafficked at age 13, sleeping in cars or cheap motels throughout high-prostitution areas of Northern California, her trafficker always nearby. Unable to grieve her son in silence \u2014 and with nowhere else to turn \u2014 she began to confide her trauma in strangers who would pay $100 to sexually abuse her for a few minutes each day, she testified at a September hearing.<\/p>\n
\u201cI just remember telling them, like, \u2018I\u2019m going through something really crazy right now,\u2019\u201d Doe said in court. \u201cThey would be like, \u2018Oh try to leave that dude.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Doe\u2019s tragic life story, as she described it under oath, was detailed over two days on the witness stand at a preliminary hearing, when she testified against 25-year-old Keonte Harris, an Antioch resident who faces life in prison if convicted on charges of beating Jamari to death and trafficking Doe. She is a key witness in the Alameda County District Attorney\u2019s prosecution of Harris, whose attorney has taken aim at the credibility of Doe\u2019s account of the days leading up to the toddler\u2019s burial in rural Napa County.<\/p>\n
Now 20, Doe testified that she\u00a0grew up in an abusive household in Solano County, and was attending middle school when a man in his 30s first trafficked her around the Bay Area. By age 14, she was pregnant with Jamari. By 15, she was a mother. By 17, she was homeless, her only source of income hinged on how many times she was willing to put up with sexual abuse by paying strangers. Typically, it was three per day, she testified.<\/p>\n
The lead up to her son\u2019s violent death, she testified, began around Thanksgiving 2022, after the then-17-year-old reconnected with Harris, a childhood friend who she says she fell in love with that year. The two discussed plans to travel and spend a life together, but their interactions were rife with abuse and violence, according to testimony. It came to an end just two days before Christmas that year, when she was detained by police in San Pablo and Harris was arrested, court records show.<\/p>\n
On Dec. 7, 2022, the last day of Jamari\u2019s life, Doe testified that she woke up in a Motel 6 in Stockton and loaded her toddler into Harris\u2019 BMW. They stopped at a McDonalds to buy the boy a Happy Meal on the way to \u201cThe Blade\u201d on Oakland\u2019s International Boulevard, widely known as the Bay Area\u2019s most violent and notorious open air sex market, where police routinely find teen girls walking the streets at night, according to court records.<\/p>\n
Before leaving her son, she took one last look at him, she said on the stand.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe had a gray sweater on and a yellow top and his jeans and some blue Crocs and a green bottle, a milk bottle, and I filled it up before leaving,\u201d she testified.<\/p>\n
At the very moment the boy was being beaten to death, Doe was in a car on a \u201cdate\u201d with a man, she said.<\/p>\n
When she returned, her son was dead. A children\u2019s hospital doctor testified Jamari suffered 22 bruises on his head and died from blunt force trauma. She testified she attempted CPR, checked for signs of life and found nothing. She continued to hold him as it sunk in that Jamari was dead. The only explanation she got from Harris was that \u201cmy son hit his head, he passed out,\u201d she said. They then drove blocks away to Highland Hospital.<\/p>\n
\u201c(Harris) tells me to leave my son in front of the hospital and they\u2019ll take him \u2026 I was screaming. Like, I was holding my son, \u2018No, I\u2019m not doing that. I\u2019m not doing that,\u2019\u201d Doe testified.<\/p>\n
So they drove to a Fairfield apartment complex where they\u2019d lived weeks earlier, and met up with 24-year-old Joel Saavedra, whose attorney says was manipulated into coming along and didn\u2019t know he was being beckoned to bury a dead child. The three drove to Napa County, in a wooded area with no streetlights, and dug a three-foot hole for Jamari. During the burial, Doe said Harris remarked he should probably leave her in a hole out there too, she testified.<\/p>\n
\u201cI also do remember him saying that he should have shot (Jamari) to make it look like an accident,\u201d Doe said on the stand.<\/p>\n
Police discovered the body weeks later, buried in a remote part of Napa County, after Harris was arrested in San Pablo.<\/p>\n
Now, with Harris\u2019 child assault causing death and human trafficking\u00a0case headed to trial, his defense attorney has taken aim at Doe\u2019s credibility, calling her a serial liar who admitted telling numerous falsehoods to police along the way.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis case relies 1,000 percent on Jane Doe\u2019s credibility and \u2026 she is not reliable,\u201d Alameda County Assistant Public Defender Jennie Otis argued at the preliminary hearing. \u201cShe will admit she lies when she is caught, but she will not admit she lies, and she continues to lie.\u201d<\/p>\n
Her description of the burial is one of the lies Doe now admits she told police, having originally claimed she was in Oakland while all this was going on. Further complicating matters, Doe was interviewed by Phong Tran, a then-Oakland detective who has since been charged with perjury for allegedly coercing witnesses into falsely incriminating murder defendants. His case is still pending.<\/p>\n
At the September hearing\u2019s end, Judge Clifford Blakely said that he was \u201cunder no illusion that Jane Doe is a perfect witness, a good witness even,\u201d but that her testimony was backed by other evidence, like jail calls where Harris and Saavedra discussed the toddler\u2019s death.<\/p>\n
For prosecutors, it is a simple affair \u2014 a case where a man \u201cbrutally murdered (Jamari) with his fists\u201d then took advantage of a grieving teen mom\u2019s trauma to squeeze even more money out of the girl.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is no greater force, fear or duress \u2026 She knew that he could already kill somebody and bury the body with no remorse,\u201d Deputy District Attorney Alexis Causey said at the hearing. \u201cShe had nowhere to go. She had no idea what to do. She was a child.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In a remote area near California\u2019s Wine Country, a teen girl held her 2-year-old son for the last…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":44527,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[861,862,27913,143,27914,863,145,12905,864,144],"class_list":["post-44526","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-bay-area-crime","tag-california-crime","tag-child-sex-abuse-industry","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-child-abuse","tag-oakland-crime","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-human-trafficking","tag-oakland-murder","tag-oakland-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44526","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44526"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44526\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44527"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44526"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44526"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44526"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}