May 8, 2007 By Jennifer Harr 3 min read

A panel of Fayette County jurors heard opening remarks Monday in the criminal homicide case lodged against Raymond “Mike” Prinkey. The 50-year-old Normalville man is accused of shooting James Cononico of Pittsburgh in the head at a Connellsville apartment on Oct. 19, 2005, just a week after Cononico’s 50th birthday.

Cononico was at Prinkey’s estranged wife’s East Washington Avenue apartment in Connellsville when Prinkey came there around 6 a.m.

In her opening remarks, Assistant District Attorney Phyllis A. Jin told the jurors that Prinkey “shoved” Cononico back inside, where Lori Prinkey was making herself and Cononico lunch for the workday. Jin said that Raymond Prinkey was screaming at Cononico, who had his hands in the air.

“(Prinkey) shot him in the back of the head and Jimmy Cononico fell to the floor,” Jin said.

She said that Lori Prinkey, who was having an affair with Cononico, asked her husband if she could call for help, but Prinkey refused to allow her to do so.

Both Jin and defense attorney David Shrager told jurors they would have to pay careful attention to 911 tapes made during the shooting and afterward as Prinkey called police to turn himself in.

Shrager told jurors that prosecutors had “at best” a voluntary manslaughter case. Voluntary manslaughter is a killing without malice, generally in the heat of passion.

Shrager argued that Prinkey, then married 17 years, was deceived by the wife he loved and trusted.

He told jurors that Lori Prinkey “lived a lie.” When she moved out of the marital home and into her apartment, Lori Prinkey did not tell her husband she was seeing another man – one that she had met in her capacity as a unit manager at a state prison, Shrager said.

Cononico was in prison on a technical parole violation for armed robbery when they met.

When he was released, Shrager told jurors that Lori Prinkey told her family she had to go to a training seminar, and instead picked Cononico up and stayed with him in a motel that night.

All the while, Shrager said, Raymond Prinkey did not know what his wife was doing.

“Mike trusted her. He thought they had a solid, good marriage,” Shrager said.

He said Lori Prinkey repeatedly told her husband that she was not seeing anyone else after she moved from their home.

“He (Prinkey) never would’ve believed she was having a sordid affair with a convict from a state prison who was an armed robber,” Shrager said.

The passion and rage that Prinkey felt when he killed Cononico negate the malice needed to prove murder, Shrager told jurors.

Jin acknowledged that Cononico had a criminal past, but told jurors they need to look beyond anything that he had done in his life.

“I would ask you, ladies and gentleman, not to lose focus of what is before you, and that is the killing – the murder – of Jimmy Cononico,” Jin said.

Judge Ralph C. Warman is presiding over the trial, which will continue this morning.