May 1, 2002 By Patty Shultz 4 min read

PITTSBURGH – “The last thing I heard her say was goodbye.” The departing words, however, were not meant to be the final words spoken between himself and his daughter, Earl Mitts told the jury on Tuesday. They were to meet later and have dinner together, but tragedy intervened and it was the last exchange between the father and daughter.

Mitts was the first prosecution witness called to the stand as the trial against a Bullskin Township man, who is accused of killing Mitts’ pregnant daughter and his 3-year-old granddaughter, got under way.

Joseph P. Minerd, 46, was flanked by family members and supporters as Mitts recounted the hours leading up to the Jan. 1, 1999, death of Deana Kay Mitts and Kayla Ashley Mitts.

Police allege Minerd rigged a pipe bomb in Deana Kay Mitts’ 504 McCormick Ave. apartment that exploded just minutes after she and her daughter entered the residence.

Earl Mitts told prosecutor Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Western District Shaun E. Sweeney that he responded to a telephone call from his daughter just minutes after she had left his South Connellsville home because she had locked her car and apartment keys in her car.

“On my way home I saw a fire truck and police car and I thought there had been an accident on Route 119,” he told Sweeney.

Approximately 40 minutes after helping his daughter retrieve her keys, he and his wife returned to the Rose Garden Apartment complex to find emergency crews extinguishing a fire at her residence.

“I ran inside the door, but they had to take me out,” said Earl Mitts.

When questioned about what he saw in the apartment, he told Sweeney the details of that day remain “sketchy.”

Deana Kay Mitts’ former neighbor, Adam Mulhorn, said he allowed her to use his telephone to call her father for help and watched briefly as the three stood outside and talked after his arrival.

Minutes later as he was walking to his kitchen he heard an explosion and watched as his kitchen appliances jumped from the floor.

As he ran outside, Mulhorn said he saw orange flames coming from the roof.

“I walked up as close as I could get, but the smoke was too thick for me to even try going inside,” he said. “I realized it was a lost cause.”

Wendy Swank was celebrating New Year’s Day around the kitchen table with family members when her mother’s Pittsburgh Street home shook from an explosion.

“We thought someone had hit the front of it,” she told Sweeney.

As she went outside, she saw smoke coming from the nearby apartment complex and ran toward the burning building.

Swank said she entered the kitchen of the home and heard someone crying out.

“I heard a woman scream ‘help me, help me,'” she tearfully told Sweeney. “I could see her walking around; she was fully engulfed in flames.

“I wish I could have done something; my heart ached for her.”

Swank said the intense heat forced her to leave the burning apartment, and as she raced into the adjacent residence to check on its occupants, she could still hear the woman’s cries for help.

“She kept screaming,” said Swank.

Connellsville firefighter William Mickey said he was alerted to the entrapment by Connellsville Township volunteer firefight John Urosek after he had made initial attempts to rescue the mother and daughter before the department’s arrival.

“The flames were everywhere,” said Mickey as he recalled entering the structure. “It was a hard fire to negotiate through. We were putting water on a fire that wasn’t going out.”

Another neighbor, Marrisa Marian, testified that she hadn’t seen Deana Kay Mitts the day before her death, but did watch as an unknown man wearing a 70s-style powder blue suit knock on her door or a nearby door and then walk away.

“It wasn’t (Minerd),” she told Kammen. “I wasn’t sure if he was knocking on my door or Deana’s or Adam’s, but I wasn’t going to answer because I didn’t know who he was.”

Marian told Kammen that she watched the man exit a car and walk to the complex from her second story window and then walk away.

She testified she saw the Mitts’ family together outside the apartment just minutes before the explosion.

Kammen in his opening statement said that the prosecution never considered anyone but Minerd as they tried to determine who planted the pipe bomb.

“Investigator (Connellsville Police Det. Lt.) Thomas Cesario told the newspapers (Minerd) was the only guy they looked at,” said Kammen. “(The investigation) is based solely on conjecture, circumstance and coincidence.”

Prosecutors speculate that Minerd killed Mitts after learning she was pregnant and that she refused to have an abortion.

Testimony continues today at 9 a.m.