A man charged with first-degree murder over the death of a college student in Newhall pleaded not guilty on Christmas Eve during his formal arraignment.
Daniel Perlman, attorney for Jack Minh Terry, 22, of Garden Grove, called the death of Emily King, “top-to-bottom, an awful, awful situation” in a phone interview prior to Wednesday’s hearing.
He also said facts would come out during the trial that will show why the L.A. County District Attorney’s Office should have never charged his client with first-degree murder.
The case was presented in front of the victim’s family, who flew in from China for “closure,” according to Deputy District Attorney Yasmin Fardghassemi in the transcript of Terry’s preliminary hearing. King’s birth name was Menghan Zhuang, and the Chinese national was set to graduate from California Institute of the Arts in the spring.
The prosecution called three people to the stand during the preliminary hearing: a homicide detective, an ex-girlfriend of Terry’s and the victim’s roommate.
At a preliminary hearing, the evidence against a defendant is first introduced, a judge hears any affirmative defense and then decides if there is enough evidence for trial.
The following story is from the transcript of Jack Terry’s Dec. 12 preliminary hearing.
Homicide detective
Sgt. Tera Frudakis was the lead investigator into King’s death for the Homicide Bureau of the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department.
Her testimony included how King met Terry after their profiles matched on the dating app Hinge in mid-January.
Almost two weeks later, the two moved their conversation to Instagram, where King and Terry arranged to meet at CalArts in Valencia on Feb. 3, the night before King was found dead.
Frudakis described how King was found by her roommate the following day after work — when King’s roommate, Cameron McGuinness, saw a man climbing out of her window earlier in the day and then became increasingly concerned when she didn’t respond to any of his messages.
After calling and then yelling through the door, McGuinness broke into the bathroom and found King lying on her side in the bathtub, partially covered by a comforter, with a phone-charging cable tied around her wrist and a broken lamp beneath her bloody body.
Frudakis interviewed McGuinness to determine King’s identity, as she had no identification or wallet with her.
Frudakis testified that she subpoenaed footage from a Ring security camera that King’s roommate had installed and produced screenshots that would later be shared with the public, prior to Terry’s arrest.
She would later use King’s phone to find out about her planned meetup with Terry the night before she was found dead. The two shared an audio call between Terry and King, prior to him picking her up from CalArts at around 11:27 p.m., according to the hearing transcripts.
Frudakis also testified that she saw Terry again after she subpoenaed the Ring security camera that King’s roommate had for the apartment.
She said on the stand that the footage showed Terry leaving the apartment through a second-story window at 12:16 p.m. the day after they met up at CalArts.
He was later arrested following surveillance and a traffic stop, according to Frudakis’ testimony, which also stated that deputies found King’s wallet and cellphone cover in a backpack inside the car that Terry was driving alone. Frudakis testified that defendants also found condoms, duct tape and a fixed blade knife.
During cross-examination, Perlman asked the detective about a previous relationship King had that ended after a domestic-violence case was filed.
The ex-girlfriend
The prosecution asked Terry’s ex-girlfriend to testify. She was identified only by her first name due to the involvement of an alleged sexual assault, for which Terry was never charged.
Terry’s ex-girlfriend was a year younger than Terry and ended their relationship several months before the defendant and victim met.
Her tearful testimony — aided in court by a support dog and a victim’s advocate/dog handler from the L.A. County District Attorney’s Office — included how she tried to confront Terry about more than one encounter that had become too violent for her.
She testified that she never reported any of her nonconsensual encounters that occurred while they were in what she said started out as a “situationship” — two people who were dating each other “without labels.”
He was dismissive when she confronted him, and she also said she felt guilt and shame because she thought the behavior was something she should be OK with as someone who wanted to be Terry’s girlfriend at the time, per her testimony.
She broke down on the stand when she started to talk about how the alleged assaults, which also included poking the victim with an umbrella and jabbing her in the ribs, began to worsen after their relationship became physical.
She testified that Terry filmed one of their sexual encounters without her consent, and alleged two other nonconsensual incidents, which she said included unwanted hair pulling and choking.
Months after their breakup, Terry’s ex-girlfriend said her mother sent her an LASD Nixle alert that the Sheriff’s Department had put out in their search for Terry, in a joking way.
“She said that she thought that it looked like my ex, and it was not in, like, a serious light. It was, ‘Oh, doesn’t this kind of look like him?’ And it really did look like him,” she testified.
She recognized the cardigan, she said on the stand. He wore it frequently. She reached out to law enforcement.
The roommate
McGuinness was trying to make the mortgage on the Newhall residence — an apartment he owned — easier when he put out an ad to find a roommate who was a CalArts student on Facebook.
Fardghassemi asked him to establish how he knew King and a little bit about their somewhat limited interactions leading up to King’s murder. She was a busy student who often left for school as he left for work, he testified.
McGuinness said on the stand he also recognized the defendant from the Nixle alert, as he recalled him briefly walking into his apartment with King the day before her murder.
The roommate recalled seeing Terry’s shoes by the door as he went to bed. He noticed the shoes were still by the door when he turned off the lights for bed.
Shortly after noon the following day, he received a Ring alert while he was at lunch with his co-workers.
“When I watched the video I saw a male jumping out of the guest room second story, with the video beginning with two bags on the landing and then the individual jumping over the railing, climbing over onto the landing, grabbing what appears to be two bags, and looking back at the window and at the door, and then going down the rest of the street out of camera view,” according to the transcript.
He said he didn’t share any alarm with his roommates because of a prior incident with King months earlier.
In September, he got a Ring alert when she tried to climb into her own window, and when he asked her what she was doing, she said, she was “testing,” McGuinness testified. He said he assumed she might have been “either on drugs or just crawling out of the window to test.”
McGuinness said on the stand that, at the time, his initial thought was a proverbial “walk of shame,” also previously testifying he had heard giggling into the early hours of the morning, and that maybe Terry was trying to leave without disturbing anyone.
“So I sent her a text message that stated, ‘You know you can have anyone over. This is your place as much as mine. You pay your rent. I don’t want you to scare my neighbors.’”
King never responded.
Terry was due in court Monday for a pretrial conference.
