Murder charges held for court
The defense attorney for Raymond “Mike” Prinkey, who is accused of shooting his wife’s lover in the head, was unable to convince a Fayette County magisterial district judge that murder charges should be dropped in the case. Attorney David Schrager acknowledged that the death of James Cononico “is not a whodunit,” and asked Magisterial District Judge Ronald Haggerty Sr. to hold only a voluntary manslaughter count for court. Haggerty held over the general criminal homicide charge, meaning jurors will have to discern if Prinkey is guilty of murder or manslaughter, or not guilty at all.
Lori Prinkey, wife of Raymond Prinkey, was the lone prosecution witness to testify.
She testified she was at her apartment on East Washington Avenue in Connellsville on Oct. 19 with Cononico, who had spent the night. Cononico was going to take the trash out, when he opened the door about 6 a.m. to find Raymond Prinkey standing there, she testified.
She testified she could not see if the men were pushing one another, but she heard her husband order Cononico back into the house.
“Back up. …I have a gun,” Prinkey testified her husband told Cononico.
Cononico turned his back to Raymond Prinkey and put his hands up in the air, Lori Prinkey testified. The men were about 2 feet apart, she testified.
Although Lori Prinkey said she grabbed her cellular telephone and dialed 9-1-1, she said her husband told her to hang up the phone.
“‘Don’t call. I’m going to shoot him,'” Lori Prinkey recalled her husband saying. “Then he said something to Jimmy about being with another man’s wife … and he shot him.”
Cononico fell forward, Lori Prinkey testified, and her husband pointed the gun toward her. She testified she crawled on the floor, trying to get under a table.
“I was begging him not to shoot me because of our kids,” she testified.
Prinkey testified her husband eventually sat down at the kitchen table and told her he wanted to talk to her. She testified he asked her why she was with Cononico, and she asked him if she could call an ambulance. Lori Prinkey testified her husband told her no.
“He’s going to die,” she testified he said.
Lori Prinkey testified that Cononico still was alive, and “struggling to breathe” when she asked.
Then, she testified, her husband removed the live, chambered round in the gun, took the clip out and left her home. She testified she called 9-1-1 and told Cononico that help was coming.
During cross-examination, Schrager repeatedly asked Lori Prinkey about her husband’s emotional state. She acknowledged that he seemed “angry,” but not in a state of “rage,” like Schrager asked.
The significance of the emotional state has to do with whether Raymond Prinkey killed Cononico with malice, which is associated with murder, or in the heat of passion, which is associated with voluntary manslaughter.
When Schrager asked Lori Prinkey if she lied about the affair, she testified she didn’t lie about it, “but I didn’t talk about it.”
And when she moved out of their home on Oct. 5, Prinkey testified she still did not tell her husband about Cononico.
“I told him I wasn’t happy with him, and I didn’t want to be there anymore,” she testified.
Schrager also asked Lori Prinkey several questions about her profession and how she met Cononico.
Lori Prinkey testified that she is employed as a unit manager at the State Correctional Institution at Somerset, where she supervises about 250 inmates in one unit. Cononico was one of the inmates she supervised, Prinkey testified.
She told Schrager he was in prison on a technical parole violation, but his original conviction was for armed robbery.
When Schrager tried to question Lori Prinkey about what type of relationship she had with Cononico while he was incarcerated, Fayette County District Attorney Nancy D. Vernon objected.
Schrager said the questions were necessary to help establish Raymond Prinkey’s state of mind when he discovered what was going on. Haggerty allowed limited questioning on the subject.
Cononico was released from prison in August, but worked out of state until two weeks before he was killed, Lori Prinkey testified. She testified the week before he was released, he indicated he wanted to see her outside of the prison walls.
Cononico died of massive head injuries from the gunshot. A report from forensic pathologist Dr. Cyril H. Wecht indicated that the manner of Cononico’s death was homicide.
During closing arguments, Schrager asked Haggerty to consider holding only the voluntary manslaughter portion of the criminal homicide charge for court.
“When a person is in a state of hot blood, a person cannot form the intent to take a life. Clearly, that’s what this case is,” Schrager said.
Vernon countered that a preliminary hearing was not the place for such a legal argument.
“This is not the time or the place to entertain summations for a jury,” she said.
After Haggerty bound over the criminal homicide charge, Prinkey was taken back to the Fayette County Prison, where he is being held without bond.