Marine and Wife killed in own home
Killed in their own home
Court testimony sheds light on rape, slayings of a Marine and his wife
By Gidget Fuentes - Staff writer
Posted : Monday Jun 29, 2009 8:25:20 EDT
MURRIETA, Calif. — When Justin P. Weissinger walked into his hangar at Camp Pendleton Marine Corps Air Station one Monday morning last October, he found a subdued and somber group in the airframes shop.
Five days earlier, Sgt. Jan Pawel Pietrzak, 24, had been shot dead in his home, alongside his wife, Quiana, 26. The two had been bound and gagged, their home torn apart and desecrated. The recently married, biracial couple’s bodies were discovered Oct. 15 after neither showed up for work.
Now Weissinger was learning about the crime, apparently a robbery that went bad, for the first time. He stepped outside the hangar with a fellow member of Marine Medium Helicopter Training Squadron 164, Lance Cpl. Tyrone Miller.
The two were no strangers to robberies and crime, Weissinger said. They had joined forces months before and shared in a string of burglaries, robberies and assaults. The reason Weissinger had been away, in fact, was because he’d been in jail. And now Miller was about to fill him in on everything he knew.
Weissinger is a star witness in the Pietrzak murder trial, where his former friend, Miller, 20, of North Carolina, is charged along with three other former Marines — Lance Cpls. Emrys J. John, 18, of Maryland, and Kesaun K. “Psycho” Sykes, 21, of California; and Pvt. Kevin D. Cox, 20, of Tennessee.
The men were kicked out of the Corps after their arrests and face a likely trial on charges that include murder and robbery. Weissinger testified June 18 in one of a series of preliminary hearings. The next court date is Tuesday.
During the June 18 hearing, Weissinger testified that he listened as Miller recounted details that hadn’t made the papers: How the four Marines forced their way into the Pietrzaks’ home; how they assaulted and terrorized the couple, binding their hands, feet, mouth and face with red duct tape; how they forced the sergeant to watch as they sexually assaulted his wife; and then finally how they shot the couple in the backs of their heads — using couch cushions to muffle the sound.
If he hadn’t been in jail on unrelated charges the night of the killings, Weissinger might have been along for the ride.
Jan and Quiana
Jan Pietrzak was born in Poland but grew up in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn, N.Y. He joined the Corps, did a tour in Iraq from July 2005 to February 2006, earned the Iraq campaign medal, Global War on Terrorism medal and National Defense Service medal, and rose to the rank of sergeant. His was a classic story of immigrant turned patriot, not uncommon in the Corps.
His mother, Henryka Pietrzak-Varga, sat through gut-wrenching testimony throughout the lengthy hearing, listening to gruesome descriptions of her son’s torture and execution along with Quiana’s mother, Glenda Fay Williams-Jenkins. The two sobbed at times as they stepped out of the courtroom.
Henryka had accepted the possibility “that my son could die in Iraq, but to die like this, in their own home?” she told the New York Daily News. “They were good kids. They didn’t deserve to die like this.”
Pietrzak met Quiana Faye Jenkins and the two were married in August. Quiana grew up in the San Bernardino area and rose above her humble origins, doing well in school and working to help others do the same. She was working toward a master’s degree in public health and employed at the Riverside County Health Department.
The couple bought a five-bedroom, three-bath home soon after their wedding, getting a deal on a foreclosure in the small community of Winchester, Calif., about a 45-minute drive northeast of Camp Pendleton. They used Jan’s re-enlistment bonus to replace the hardwood floors and carpet.
That home, their dream, became the backdrop for a nightmare.
A gruesome scene
Investigators found a gruesome scene when they arrived at the house shortly after 9 a.m. the morning after the home invasion.
The sergeant was clad in boxer shorts and a T-shirt and his wife was nude, their bodies splayed across the floor and sofa in the living room. Police found seat pillows with small holes that investigators say were used to muffle the gunshots, and a vibrator believed to have been used to rape Quiana.
Furniture and belongings throughout the house were upended. In the master bedroom upstairs, someone had scrawled “Nigger Lover” on a wall. Investigators saw remnants of what looked like several small fires, in what they believe was the Marines’ failed attempts to burn the house and cover up their crimes.
According to arrest warrants, each of the four men admitted to the robbery and assaults when interviewed by police. Three pointed the finger at John as the shooter.
Weissinger’s testimony matched those findings. “I asked [Miller] if he had anything to do with it. I asked him what happened,” Weissinger told the court, noting that Miller had told him of run-ins with the sergeant “in the past, and he didn’t really like [Pietrzak] that much.”
Weissinger said Miller told him the four Marines rang the doorbell and Pietrzak opened the door, a kitchen knife in his hand, his wife standing on the nearby stairway.
“[Miller] put a shotgun to his chest and told him to go into the house,” Weissinger said. “Then Sergeant Pietrzak dropped the knife and went into the house.”
The Marines “had them lay in the living room on the floor,” he said. “They started going through the house, and they were asking Sergeant Pietrzak and his wife where was their jewelry, any guns that he had.” The Marines, Miller said, kicked Pietrzak several times.
But the Pietrzaks didn’t have anything worth stealing, just a little jewelry and a small TV, Weissinger said. “They got angry and they assaulted him.”
Then the men turned to his wife, using several objects to rape her in front of her husband. After that, “he said that they had them kneel over the couch, and they placed a seat cushion over his head and they shot him,” Weissinger recalled of the conversation. “They shot the wife, too.”
Each got two shots to the head. But the Marines saw that the sergeant wasn’t dead.
“They turned and shot him again and shot her again,” Weissinger said. Miller, Weissinger testified, stopped and “picked up the casings.”
Within a couple of weeks, authorities were zeroing in on Miller and his pals. Fingerprints, shoeprints and other evidence found at the Pietrzaks’ house led detectives and agents from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service to Camp Pendleton.
Two weeks later, authorities arrested four Marines, including Miller, in connection with the Pietrzaks’ deaths. They found an assortment of stolen property in the four Marines’ homes and barracks rooms, as well as gloves, ski masks and bandanas used in their alleged crimes.
Some of the stolen property belonged to the Pietrzaks, investigators said. In a closet hung the sergeant’s dress blues coat, his medals still pinned on. On a piece of paper was scrawled the Pietrzaks’ home address.
Road to trouble
Weissinger, 22, whose Marine Corps rank has not been established, was kicked out of the Corps on Feb. 2 after popping positive on a drug test, according to his courtroom testimony. He was recently arrested for possession of stolen property.
This month, he’s in pretrial confinement yet again at the county lockup in Vista, awaiting expected charges of evading police after an alleged home burglary, an incident he told the court he didn’t recall because he popped pills that zapped much of his memory of that night.
Weissinger had considered Miller his friend. But after Miller recounted his story that morning at work, he issued an unfriendly warning, Weissinger testified: Anyone who tried to cross him would find themselves in the headlines next.
For the next two weeks, Weissinger carried a pistol everywhere he went — even when partying with the friend he now feared.
Like Weissinger, Miller was a helicopter mechanic and was assigned to Marine Medium Helicopter Training Squadron 164 with Cox, a systems technician. John was an airframes mechanic with HMM-268, while Sykes was serving with 1st Marine Division at the base.
Weissinger’s acquaintance with the men came mostly through his friendship with Miller, and a criminal hobby outside the Corps he claims they shared.
The Marines allegedly teamed up for home-invasion robberies and burglaries, collecting iPods and other electronics, cash and even drugs. According to courtroom testimony, they robbed strangers as well as acquaintances of friends, including Miller’s girlfriend, who has had her own run-ins with police.
Weissinger said he and Miller met in September 2007 during airframe mechanic training, and the friendship continued at Camp Pendleton. Weissinger said that relationship evolved into criminal activity — first with Miller and then, in early 2008, with Cox, who was Miller’s friend.
By August, Weissinger told the court, the three began stealing things from houses, always at night and usually armed. Sometimes, he said, people were inside the houses or apartments and the crimes became more violent.
Prosecutors asked him about one case in particular, drawing parallels between that incident and the Pietrzaks’ case. One night in September, Weissinger was riding around town in a car with the Marines and Miller’s girlfriend, Melissa Buck, a local woman with her own rap sheet and friendships that reportedly extended to local thugs. That night, Buck led them on a planned robbery of a drug dealer at his Oceanside home, where they expected to find money, drugs and weapons.
Buck told the court she set up the whole thing, according to testimony, and the group used bandanas to hide their faces as they entered the house. Weissinger said he and Miller were armed with handguns.
Inside, according to testimony, the group encountered the dealer, forced him to the floor in the living room and dispersed, collecting whatever they could find — cash, an iPod, an Xbox, a purse and a jewelry box. Upstairs, Buck heard fighting and found Weissinger and Miller — and a naked woman, believed to be the dealer’s girlfriend — in a room that had been trashed.
Buck ordered the woman to leave the room and told her boyfriend, Miller, “Be quiet and let’s go.” Downstairs, the Marines ordered the woman to lie face-down on the floor, and several kicked and punched the man before they rushed out of the house.
Weissinger, testifying at Riverside County Superior Court’s southwest judicial center in Murrieta, said he had participated in “more than 10” such burglaries in north San Diego County, including Oceanside and Fallbrook.
He showed up at the Murrieta courtroom in shackles, dressed in navy blue prisoner garb, his hands cuffed to his waist. He was walking on crutches because his left leg was injured during a recent incident with police.
Weissinger’s recounting of Miller’s conversation prompted loud sobs from the Pietrzaks’ family and friends. In testimony that at times turned dramatic — speaking for the prosecution with some immunity protection — Weissinger insisted he was telling it like it is.
“I think that their families deserve to hear the truth,” Weissinger said, hunched over in the witness box, “and I feel that [the foursome] should be punished for what they did.”
The preliminary hearing will continue Tuesday, as the court attempts to determine if the government has enough evidence to proceed to trial. The four former Marines, jailed since their arrests, have pleaded not guilty.
Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty.
