Jenkins sanity at issue

      VISTA, Calif. -- Two starkly different pictures of the Las Vegas teen-ager who killed his parents, grandparents and sister in 1993 were drawn Thursday during opening statements in the sanity phase of his trial.
      The public defenders representing Joshua Jenkins, who present their case first because they now bear the burden of proof, showed intricate, demonic drawings and read from his writings about mass murder to show, as Deputy Public Defender William LaFond said, "this boy was legally insane at the time he committed these crimes."
      But prosecutor Mark Pettine said Jenkins formed a careful plan over several weeks to kill his family. He said Jenkins chafed at his parents' rules and was angry at being sent to a school for disturbed youngsters outside Los Angeles.
      Jenkins, now 16, sat still and expressionless as both attorneys outlined his life.
      The defense attorney, LaFond, began with Jenkins' birth to a woman from Pennsylvania and his adoption "into the waiting and loving arms of George and Alene Jenkins, two of the deceased in this case."
      He said four thick binders stacked on the defense table contained "school reports and tests documenting this boy's life from the time he was 5 years old," when his parents first realized there was something wrong with their son.
      LaFond said George and Alene Jenkins had "a blindness, a denial of aspects of this boy's illness," and resisted the Clark County School District's attempts to classify him as "severely emotionally disturbed."
      He said that when the parents threatened to sue the district over their son's classification, school officials will testify they "did something they regret to this day -- they bowed to the pressure and they changed the designation from severely emotionally disturbed to learning disabled."
      In fact, on the day that Jenkins' parents met with school district officials to set up an educational plan for him, LaFond said, Jenkins presented a teacher with several bizarre drawings, including one of himself hurtling off a bicycle ramp into a spike-lined crevice watched over by a devil. School officials "interpreted this in one way ... that this boy was asking for help," LaFond said.
      School district officials who are scheduled to testify include Jackie Arberg and Judith Skomars, both educational psychologists who dealt with Jenkins when he was in eighth and ninth grades at Becker Middle School and Cimarron-Memorial High School.
      LaFond said the crimes against his family were "horrific," adding, "in fact, the gore, the gruesomeness, is the strongest evidence in support of Joshua's insanity."
      In his opening statement, Pettine detailed the events of the night of Feb. 3, 1996, when Jenkins killed his parents and his mother's parents, William and Evelyn Grossman, and the next morning, when he took his 10-year-old sister shopping for an ax he then used to kill her.
      Pettine showed the jury large color photos of the injuries to the neck and chest of Megan Jenkins. He said experts will testify that the marks show that the girl was conscious and aware when she was killed, not, as Jenkins told police, knocked unconscious with the ax after falling asleep on the couch.
      Pettine said Jenkins was also motivated by greed; that his single question to homicide investigators at the end of his interview was, "What's gonna happen to all my stuff -- my house and my car?"
      "That was his only concern," Pettine said. "Not what he had done to his family, only about their property, which he called his property."
      The case will resume Monday with testimony from the county medical examiner who performed the autopsies on the five victims.