Jurors to get bombing case today

LITTLE ROCK — After listening to four hours’ worth of closing arguments in the federal bombing case against Russellville doctor Randeep Mann, a federal jury was sent home Wednesday evening with instructions to begin deliberations this morning.

Mann, 52, is accused of masterminding the bombing that occurred on the morning of Feb. 4, 2009, in the West Memphis driveway of Dr. Trent Pierce, the chairman of the Arkansas State Medical Board.

The board, which had already twice suspended Mann’s prescription-writing privileges, had just ordered a new investigation that threatened to take away his medical license for good. Pierce, then 54, was scheduled to drive to Little Rock that day for aboard meeting.

“This case is not complicated,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Karen Whatley told the six men and six women who have been hearing the case in the Little Rock courtroom of U.S. District Judge Brian Miller since the trial began July 6.

“This case,” Whatley said, “is about a man obsessed with firearms, who had access to explosives, and who was intent on harming someone with what he had access to, and two people’s desire to cover that up.”

Pierce, who was blinded in the left eye by the explosion and now has a glass eye in its place, sat in the front row of the courtroom gallery with his wife, Melissa, who testified about hearing the explosion, running outside and finding him in the flower bed, charred from head to toe.

Mann faces two charges related to the bombing of Pierce who also lost part of his hearing, his sense of smell and suffered severe arm and leg wounds after he picked up a grenade-rigged spare tire that someone had propped up against his sport utility vehicle overnight.

Mann is also charged with possessing two unregistered guns found at his house during the execution of a search warrant, and possessing 98 live grenades that were found buried near his house a month after the bombing, leading to the search warrant.

Mann and his wife, Sangeeta “Sue” Mann, 49, are jointly charged with conspiring to obstruct an investigation of him that began after the grenades were unearthed, and concealing documents that Sangeeta Mann ultimately turned over to the grand jury. Sangeeta Mann also is charged with lying to a federal grand jury when she said the “only” reason she took the financial documents related to her brother-in-law from her husband’s office was to keep them safe.

Prosecutors say the real reason she took the documents was to help her husband hide them from investigators. The documents ended up being insignificant in the bombing case, but prosecutors say that was up to federal investigators to decide.

In her closing remarks, Whatley discussed two grenade manuals found in Mann’s home that contained instructions about launcher propelled grenades, like those found buried near the house, and hand-held grenades, like the MK3A2 concussion grenade that was used in the bombing.

A retired gun dealer from Missouri testified during the trial that he sold both types of grenades to Mann. But on cross-examination, and again in closing arguments Wednesday, defense attorneys attacked the dealer’s credibility.

Attorney Blake Hendrix reminded jurors that the dealer, Lloyd Hahn, who was given immunity for his testimony, would have wanted to please prosecutors to ensure he didn’t end up going to prison for his own admitted violations of gun laws.

Although Hahn, 71, testified before a federal grand jury that he manufactured one of the unregistered guns found in Mann’s house, he later testified at trial that he was mistaken, and it actually wasn’t one of his guns. Hahn told jurors that he was initially confused because he examined the gun in poor lighting, but defense attorney Tim Dudley said in his closing argument that Hahn’s conflicting testimony amounted to perjury.

“The ATF can’t put him in a room that has a light?” he asked incredulously.

“Who would take the word of a perjurer who changed his testimony to fit the case and send a man to prison?” Dudley scoffed.

Dudley also noted that Hahn at first told authorities he had sold Mann 90 to 92 40mm launcher-propelled grenades, but later, after learning that 98 such grenades had been unearthed near Mann’s home, changed his testimony to say he’d sold Mann closer to 100 of them.

“If someone’s willing to set Dr. Mann up, maybe they did it with these grenades,” Dudley asserted.

Referring to the hand-held style of grenade that exploded when Pierce moved it, Whatley reminded jurors of testimony from an explosives expert from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives that the MK3A2 is “the only grenade in the world with a fiber body.” She reminded them that Hahn “was very specific that what he sold Mann had a fiber body,” and that investigators found pieces of a fiber grenade body at the site of the explosion.

That type of grenade, Whatley said, is so rare that the government had trouble finding one to render inert and use as an exhibit at the trial.

Attorneys also discussed the significance of a “doughnut”-size spare tire from a Mazda RX-7 that investigators found in a shower stall in Mann’s house a month after the bombing. The grenade that injured Pierce was taped to the underside of a doughnut-size spare from a 2002 Nissan Altima.

Whatley noted that a good friend of Mann’s who lives in Memphis owned a 2002 Nissan Altima whose spare tire couldn’t be found after the bombing. The man testified that after his daughter had a flat and used the small spare in 2003, he changed it out for a full-size spare and doesn’t remember what he did with the doughnut-size spare.

Defense attorneys noted that there are thousands of Nissan Altimas with spare tires manufactured in the same time frame as the one used in the bombing.

They said that investigators simply set their sights on Mann first and then found evidence to support their suspicions, partly because his collection of firearms made him an easy suspect on a list of five doctors who’d had trouble with the medical board.

“The focus of their investigation immediately got very, very narrow,” Hendrix said.

Dudley, who represented Sangeeta Mann, told jurors that the government “abused its power” in using its resources to indict her, “a little lady in Russellville,” simply to pressure her to turn against her husband.

“That’s why Sue Mann is sitting in this courtroom,” he told jurors, “because she wouldn’t cooperate, she wouldn’t tell a lie, she wouldn’t do something she knew would be morally wrong.”

One of the first government witnesses in the trial was a housekeeper for the Pierces, Velma Gales, who testified that she drove past the Pierce home at the corner of Avalon and Cooper streets in West Memphis at about 10:30 or 11 p.m. the night before the bombing and saw a man with a long ponytail, wearing jeans and a baseball cap, jogging in place. She also noticed a vehicle parked near the Pierces’ unused rear driveway around the corner.

At the time, Whatley noted, the Pierces didn’t have iron gates blocking both driveways, like they do now, and someone could have easily walked undetected from the rear drive on Cooper to the circular drive on Avalon where the Pierces’ vehicles were parked.

When she drove past the house again half an hour later, Gales testified, the car and the jogger were gone.

She described the jogger as possibly Iranian, or like “one of those people that wear those little dots on their forehead.”

After looking across the courtroom at Randeep Mann, who is a native of India, Gales said the jogger wasn’t him, but someone probably 20 years younger.

Prosecutors have suggested that someone else planted the bomb for Mann, but no one else has been charged.

Dudley said the government was unfairly assuming that because the jogger looked foreign, he must have been connected to Mann.

He noted that electronic records and gym employees proved that the Manns were working out in a gym in Russellville, six counties away, until after 10 that night.