By RALPH BARTHOLDT

Staff Writer

COEUR d’ALENE — Prison inmate and convicted felon Jennifer Doane did not want to testify against her friend, Jonathan D. Renfro, at his murder trial in Coeur d’Alene.

The woman who used a syringe to inject Renfro — his friends call him J.D. — with methamphetamine on the night that he allegedly shot and killed Coeur d’Alene Police Sgt. Greg Moore, and then exchanged text messages with Renfro as he attempted to elude police, had asked the public defender’s office to help keep her off the stand.

The subpoena she was served behind bars made her look like a “snitch,” she told the court Monday at Renfro’s trial for first-degree murder in First District Court.

She had called the Kootenai County public defender’s office before the trial to ask “How do I put in a motion to stop being transported to come here?” she said Monday, while sitting as a witness in Courtroom 1 of the old Kootenai County courthouse.

Doane, an Idaho Department of Correction inmate who was transported to Kootenai County to testify, and her friend, Miranda Rafferty, also a witness and Idaho Department of Correction inmate, were drug addicts living in Coeur d’Alene May 4, 2015, the day before Moore’s death.

The three of them, Doane, Rafferty and Renfro, had hung out at a small purple house on A Street, just behind Albertson’s, on the afternoon before the shooting.

Hours later, as Renfro fled from police after allegedly killing Moore with one shot to the head from a 9mm handgun he carried in his pocket, the two women, as well as Renfro’s former girlfriend, Kayla Best, exchanged text messages with Renfro in an attempt to help him elude police, according to Monday’s testimony.

The street where the purple house is, A Street, is a short, narrow enclave of overhanging trees, parked cars, a boat and garbage cans. Its dead end is a fence separating tiny yards from the Ironwood Mall.

Doane lived here as caretaker for a disabled woman named Susan who tried to help Doane quit drugs. J.D. brought over a lawnmower on the afternoon of May 4, and a bag of methamphetamine. Jennifer cut the grass as J.D. showed his gun to Rafferty. He was proud of the piece that he kept stuck in his belt. He took it apart and then put it back together.

“He was showing it to me,” said Rafferty, who appeared Monday in blue prison clothing. “I know it was a Glock. I know it was black.”

He had also shown the stolen handgun to Best a week earlier, bragging to her that he was a superb marksman.

“He said he could outshoot anyone,” Best said. Renfro told her the Glock and its hollow-point ammunition “could blow a hole in anything.”

Renfro wanted the stolen gun for protection, he told Best, as well as to make sure “everything went according to plan in burglaries.”

The gun made him feel like a big man, she said.

“He was excited, like he had elevated his status in the group,” she said.

In the backyard around a fire pit at the A Street house, the three of them smoked meth and Renfro had trouble injecting himself. He was unable to, so Doane injected the meth mixed with water into his arm.

“I gave him the shot, I applied it to his arm and gave him the shot,” Doane said.

That evening the women went shopping with Renfro at Goodwill. After midnight, Renfro drove his red and white older-model pickup to Walmart in Hayden, parked it there and walked west.

Not long after, Rafferty got a message from Renfro on her cellphone’s voicemail.

“He said he won’t be back at the house, something had happened,” Rafferty told the court. “It sounded like running. It sounded like footprints, like feet hitting the pavement and then it cut off.”

The text messages and voicemails to the three women lasted almost two hours in the aftermath of Moore’s death, which occurred around 1:30 a.m., May 5, a mile and half southwest of Walmart in a neighborhood in the Sunshine Meadows development.

Renfro allegedly stole Moore’s patrol vehicle and drove it to Walmart near Stateline at the behest of Best who promised to pick him up there — what she referred to as the “safe spot.”

“I would be taking a car and going to pick him up,” Best said. Then she turned on the scanner.

The other women had scanner apps on their phone and tuned in as well.

A frantic array of text messages exchanged between Renfro and the women between 1:30 a.m. and 3:30 a.m. included snippets and half thoughts:

“Hey dude, you OK?”

“No. F***ed.”

And…

“WTF you do why everybody is looking for you?”

And…

“Don’t take Centennial Trail, they’re at the border.”

“Just called in Spirit Lake police.”

“They shut down I-90, right now.”

Best informed Renfro that she wouldn’t be coming to get him because the area near Cabela’s was surrounded by police. She told him to ditch his cellphone and run away.

In some way, Renfro had prepared for the scenario, Best said.

“He didn’t want to be back in jail ... In custody,” Best said. “He would do whatever it takes not to.”

She told the court that Renfro, her former boyfriend with whom she had a short, intimate relationship shortly before the shooting, would resist police.

“He was going to get in a shootout,” Best said.

Judge Lansing Haynes upheld an objection by defense attorney Linda Payne to prohibit testimony from an Idaho State Police weapons specialist. The officer was supposed to testify about the tactical advantages of shooting someone using a gun kept in their pocket. Renfro allegedly shot Moore with the 9mm in his pocket from a distance of less than 2 feet.

Defense attorneys asked each of the inmate witnesses and Best, who is on probation, if they feared being prosecuted as accessories to murder.

They did, they said.

“Isn’t one of the conditions of probation to cooperate with law enforcement, and if you don’t cooperate you will have to go back to jail?” Payne asked Best, who is pregnant. “How much time is holding over your head?”

If her sentence is imposed, Best could serve as much as five years behind bars, she said.

The trial resumes today at 9 a.m.