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1998–2002 · THREE CASES FROM THE ST. JOSEPH SUPERIOR COURT
Below the cases a city remembers by a single name stands a second rank: the murders whose permanent record is the appellate report itself. Three South Bend cases of 1998 and 1999 reached the Indiana Supreme Court and stand affirmed there, and they are entered together, at the size their record carries.
In the early morning of 30 May 1998, in the 600 block of Cottage Grove Avenue, Kevin McLoughlin was killed during an attempted robbery. Shemika Lee was convicted of felony murder for his death and sentenced to sixty years, and the Supreme Court affirmed the conviction on 6 October 2000 — Lee v. State, No. 71S00-0002-CR-44.
On the morning of 28 May 1999, Joshua L. Warner attacked Jennifer Rokop in her home at 3810 Langley Drive; her five-year-old daughter was awakened by the attack. The trial court dismissed a felony-murder conviction on double-jeopardy grounds, and a jury convicted Warner of murder and attempted robbery, for which he was sentenced to fifty-five years and ten years, consecutive. The Supreme Court, in Warner v. State, 773 N.E.2d 239 (2002), vacated the attempted-robbery conviction — the State had amended the charging information too late — and otherwise affirmed: the murder conviction and its fifty-five years stand, and a post-conviction court in 2009 left them undisturbed.
Abdullah Alkhalidi, a South Bend resident, was convicted in the St. Joseph Superior Court of the murder, robbery and theft of Claude Purdiman in May 1999. Purdiman, a resident of Elkhart County, had traveled with Alkhalidi on a trip to the Blue Chip Casino; his partially burned body was found in Michigan, about ten miles from the state border. Alkhalidi challenged Indiana's jurisdiction and the venue, and on 23 August 2001 the Supreme Court affirmed — Alkhalidi v. State, No. 71S00-0005-CR-288 — sustaining the South Bend trial of a case whose victim was not a South Bend man and whose body was found across two state lines. The sentence was sixty-five years. The boundary is printed as the record draws it: the case is South Bend's by the defendant's residence, by where Purdiman was last seen, and by the court that tried it.
Sources:
- Lee v. State, No. 71S00-0002-CR-44 (Ind. 6 October 2000)
- Warner v. State, 773 N.E.2d 239 (Ind. 2002); Warner v. State, No. 71A03-0905-PC-238 (Ind. Ct. App. 31 December 2009)
- Alkhalidi v. State, No. 71S00-0005-CR-288 (Ind. 23 August 2001)