Nikko Jenkins walked out of the Nebraska State Penitentiary in Lincoln on July 30, 2013, on the date his sentence ran out. He had spent close to 60 percent of his time in state custody in segregation cells, alone for about 23 hours a day, and he went from one of those cells straight back to the community with no parole officer, no treatment plan and no transition program. In the months before his release he had told prison staff, the parole board and a county prosecutor that he would kill people once he got out. Within about three weeks, four people in Omaha were dead.
Jorge Cajiga-Ruiz and Juan Uribe-Pena were shot on August 11, 2013, in a park in south Omaha. Curtis Bradford, a young man Jenkins knew from prison, was shot on August 19. Andrea Kruger, a mother of three driving home from work, was pulled from her SUV and shot on August 21. Jenkins pleaded no contest to four counts of first-degree murder in April 2014 and was found guilty. A panel of three judges sentenced him to death in 2017.
The case did not end with the killings or the sentence. It set off a state ombudsman's investigation and then a special investigative committee of the Nebraska Legislature, which found that a state psychologist had withheld a psychiatrist's warning that might have led to Jenkins being civilly committed instead of released. The committee's work led to laws limiting solitary confinement and creating an independent inspector general for Nebraska's prisons. In court, the question of whether Jenkins was mentally ill or pretending to be held up his sentencing for three years and has run through his appeals ever since.
Jenkins's involvement with the state began when he was seven years old, when he was first placed in state foster care, according to the report of Nebraska's ombudsman, Marshall Lux. At about that age, according to WOWT, he brought a loaded handgun to school. Lux told lawmakers in 2014 that Jenkins had been in both the child welfare and juvenile justice systems since age seven, and added: "His case is not unique."
The legislative committee that later reviewed his life described a home marked by violence. A psychiatrist who examined Jenkins, Dr. Eugene Oliveto, called it a terrible childhood: Jenkins was abused by an alcoholic father, the family was, in Oliveto's words, "beyond dysfunctional," and his mother and a sister had also been jailed. In 1995, when he was eight, a psychiatrist, Dr. Jane Dahlke, evaluated him after episodes of aggression and statements about hurting and killing himself. She diagnosed oppositional defiant disorder and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and considered childhood bipolar disorder.
His lawyers' account, set out in a 2019 petition to the U.S. Supreme Court, adds that a court-ordered evaluation at age 11 described the family home as "ripe with violence, alcohol and drug abuse," that he was abused by relatives, and that by 13 he had lived in 17 different out-of-home placements. The petition was an advocacy document, and those details are the defense's version of his childhood.
He was held several times at the Douglas County juvenile detention center and moved through group homes. In August 2001, at 14, he was sent to the Youth Rehabilitation and Treatment Center in Kearney for about six months.
In 2002, according to KPTM, Jenkins carjacked a woman at gunpoint near 24th and Redick in north Omaha, holding a shotgun to her head. The Associated Press later described his first adult sentence as a roughly ten-year term for two carjackings. The formal convictions, as the ombudsman recorded them, were two counts of robbery and one count of use of a weapon to commit a felony. He was 17. He entered the Nebraska Correctional Youth Facility on November 11, 2003, on an indeterminate sentence of 14 to 15 years. At his death-penalty hearing in 2016, two people he had robbed as a teenager testified about being carjacked at gunpoint.
Prison added to his time. A near riot at the youth facility on July 4, 2005, put him in segregation for 40 days, and a 2006 conviction for second-degree assault arising from a disturbance there added two years. He was moved to the Lincoln Correctional Center in 2006, then to the Omaha Correctional Center, and in February 2007 took part in an assault on another inmate at the Lincoln center. On June 8, 2007, he was transferred to the Tecumseh State Correctional Institution and placed in administrative confinement.
On December 17, 2009, while on a supervised trip to Omaha for a family funeral, he tried to escape and struck an escort officer. He was held in the Douglas County jail from February 2010 to July 2011 while that case was resolved. On July 11, 2011, he was sentenced to two to four more years for third-degree assault on a correctional employee, which brought his total sentence to 18 to 21 years. The sentencing judge, Gary Randall, wrote that Jenkins had "a long and serious history of mental illness which inhibits his ability to be rehabilitated."
Short stays in segregation began in 2005, but the long ones started when he reached Tecumseh in 2007. The ombudsman calculated that Jenkins spent about 58 of roughly 97 months in the Department of Correctional Services in segregation, close to 60 percent. His lawyers' petition lists the stretches, the longest being 545 days from June 2007 to December 2008, 383 days from January 2009 to February 2010, and 742 days from July 2011 until his release in July 2013. Most of it was classified as administrative confinement. He was locked alone in a cell for about 23 hours a day, with an hour of exercise in a fenced outdoor pen.
In July 2008 he was taken off the waiting list for a transition program after he made homicidal statements. He was never moved back into the general population before his release, and the state had no program to help him make that step, Lux told legislators in May 2014.
Good-time credit also shaped when he got out. Under the 18 to 21 year sentence, the legislative committee found, he had about 126 months of good time available. He lost 555 days of it for misconduct ranging from assault to tattooing, had 30 days restored, and was discharged with about 108 and a half months credited. Because he served his full term rather than being paroled, there was no supervision once he left. Jenkins himself used the prison term for it: he would "jam out."
The doctors who saw Jenkins in these years did not agree about him, and that disagreement runs through the whole case. On July 30, 2009, Dr. Natalie Baker, a contract psychiatrist at Tecumseh, diagnosed a psychotic disorder, possible schizoaffective disorder and probable post-traumatic stress disorder and prescribed antipsychotic and mood-stabilizing medication. Jenkins often refused it, the committee found, because he believed he was being poisoned. In 2010 Dr. Oliveto, who treated him in the Douglas County jail, diagnosed schizoaffective disorder or schizophrenia, PTSD and antisocial personality disorder and recommended a forensic evaluation and placement at the Lincoln Regional Center, the state psychiatric hospital. Neither happened.
On December 1, 2010, a prison therapist, Denise Gaines, wrote to the Board of Parole recommending treatment at the regional center and, if he was ever paroled, mental health treatment as a condition. The committee noted it was the only such letter she had written in her career. In February 2012, however, an internal Mental Illness Review Team found "a lack of evidence" of a major mental illness and a "preponderance of evidence" of personality disorder. The department's psychologists consistently described his problems as behavioral, the committee wrote, in conflict with the three psychiatrists who had diagnosed a major illness.
Meanwhile he harmed himself. On May 2, 2012, he cut his face and used his blood to write "Apophis evil Nikko" on his cell wall; Apophis is a serpent figure of ancient Egyptian religion, and Jenkins would later say the voice of Apophis told him to kill. On January 18, 2013, he cut his face with a piece of floor tile. His lawyers' petition records cuts to his face that needed 11 stitches, mutilation of his genitals and suicide attempts.
As his discharge date approached, Jenkins asked repeatedly not to be released. His lawyers' petition counts 23 occasions on which he predicted his own future violence and 87 requests for mental health care or threats to harm others. An August 2008 memo by a prison mental health worker already noted that he "has expressed having ongoing homicidal ideations and has made threats to hurt others once he is released."
On February 4, 2013, Dr. Baker evaluated him again. He was on suicide checks every 15 minutes, had cut his face and refused to have the stitches removed, and talked about plans to eat the hearts of women, men and children after his release. Baker wrote that he "currently appears mentally ill as well as an imminent danger to others" and "will possibly require civil commitment prior to being released to ensure his safety as well as the safety of others."
On February 17 and 18, 2013, Jenkins filed grievances asking for emergency protective custody and psychiatric hospitalization. Both were dismissed as not meeting the department's emergency criteria. He wrote that his mother was preparing a petition to the Johnson County attorney, whose office handles mental health commitments for the county where Tecumseh is located. Staff said she took notes during a visit, and her visiting privileges were suspended for 30 days. On March 7, according to a social worker's notes, he said he did not want to be discharged because he would kill people and cannibalize them. On March 10 he wrote to the parole board that he was "now in a very seriously severe emergency need."
The prosecutor did act. On February 25, 2013, Rick Smith, a Johnson County deputy attorney, contacted the department about a possible commitment and two days later forwarded the handwritten petitions Jenkins had sent him. He spoke with Dr. Mark Weilage, a department psychologist and assistant behavioral health administrator, who told him staff would "continue to monitor, evaluate and treat" Jenkins. Weilage did not send Smith Dr. Baker's report or tell him about the threats and self-harm. On March 11 Smith wrote that he needed "to hear from a mental health expert who can testify as to mental illness and dangerousness." On March 13 a second psychiatrist, Dr. Martin Wetzel, noted probable bipolar disorder and probable PTSD. On March 15 Jenkins was moved to the penitentiary in Lincoln, which took his case out of Johnson County's jurisdiction.
The ombudsman's office was also involved. Two of its staff members, Jerall Moreland and James Davis, later testified that they had urged prison administrators to prepare a transition plan for Jenkins, and Davis said he raised his concern directly with the corrections director at the time, Bob Houston. At a meeting with the ombudsman's office on March 20, 2013, the department's lawyer said Jenkins's mental health was "off the table," and Weilage again did not share Baker's report. Moreland and Davis said that if they had seen it they would have pushed for commitment. On April 30, 2013, Jenkins told staff that when he got out, "it will begin."
Jenkins was discharged from the penitentiary on July 30, 2013, his mandatory release date. The legislative committee later summed up the circumstances: he was "released directly from a long stretch of segregation with virtually no mental health treatment, no rehabilitation programming and bypassing obvious opportunities for civil commitment." Police said afterward that they had been keeping track of him since his release.
Jorge Cajiga-Ruiz was 29 and Juan Uribe-Pena was 26. Beyond their ages and the city where they died, little about their lives has been reported, and no family statement about either man has appeared. Some broadcasters shortened their names to Jorge Ruiz and Juan Pena; the court and the Associated Press used their full names.
On the night they died, two of Jenkins's female relatives met the two men at a club, according to WOWT's summary of the case, and lured them to Spring Lake Park in south Omaha with the promise of sex. Prosecutors said Jenkins was waiting. On August 11, 2013, police found both men dead in a pickup truck in the park. Each had been shot in the head with a deer slug, and they had been robbed, according to the Nebraska Supreme Court's account of the State's case. The relatives were his sister Erica Jenkins and a cousin, Christine Bordeaux, according to the later prosecutions; Bordeaux's prosecutors said she did not know Jenkins meant to kill the men.
Curtis Bradford was 22. He had met Jenkins in prison, and police said the two had been at the same party the night before he died. His mother, Velita Glasgow, and his sister, Temperance Ivory, became the family's public voices. Ivory said in 2017 that Curtis had been "like our glue." At the 2016 sentencing hearing his mother told the judges: "I no longer have holidays. Nikko Jenkins still has that."
Prosecutors said Bradford was lured out with talk of a robbery the two would commit together. On August 19, 2013, he was found near 18th and Clark Streets in Omaha with gunshot wounds to the back of the head. According to the evidence at Erica Jenkins's trial, as reported by KLKN-TV, she shot him in the back of the head with a revolver and her brother then shot him in the head with a shotgun. Authorities said she believed Bradford's friends had shot at her house earlier that year. KLKN dated the planned robbery to August 18, the night before he was found.
Andrea Kruger was 33, married to Michael Kruger, and the mother of three children. She worked at the Deja Vu Lounge in west Omaha, whose owner, Nikki Richardson, was a close friend. Her brother, Ryan Roberts, remembered her smile. "Every time I think about Andrea, I think about that smile," he told WOWT a year after her death. "Her smile was infectious." Her mother, Teri Roberts, spoke for the family in court for years afterward.
On August 21, 2013, Kruger left the lounge after closing to drive home. About 20 minutes later, at the intersection of 168th and Fort Streets, just outside Omaha's city limits, she was stopped. Jenkins pulled her from her SUV and shot her several times; the Associated Press reported four shots. She was found dead in the street. Police said she and Jenkins did not know each other. According to the prosecution of his uncle, Warren Levering, the group, made up of Jenkins, Levering, Erica Jenkins and Christine Bordeaux, had driven to west Omaha because Jenkins wanted to steal a car. Jenkins and Levering took the SUV, which was found in north Omaha, and surveillance cameras recorded Levering setting it on fire in an alley.
The killings had looked at first like three separate cases. Tips to Crime Stoppers helped police connect them, and agencies including the U.S. Marshals Service and the FBI's Omaha office assisted. On Thursday, August 29, 2013, Jenkins was arrested after a woman reported that he had threatened to kill her family, and he was held on terroristic threats charges. Police announced the next day that they were tying him to all four deaths. His mother and two sisters were also arrested, along with Christine Bordeaux and another man accused of supplying him with a gun.
Omaha police detective Dave Schneider later testified that in an eight-hour interview in September 2013 Jenkins confessed and was "very specific about things that only someone who was there would know." Murder charges were filed on September 4, 2013, and on September 5 Douglas County Judge Joseph Caniglia ordered him held without bail. Douglas County Attorney Don Kleine said his office would look at why Jenkins had been released and would consider the death penalty.
The physical evidence included the ammunition. The Nebraska Supreme Court recorded that the men at Spring Lake Park were shot with deer slugs. Jenkins's mother, Lori Jenkins, was convicted in federal court in April 2014 of being a felon in possession of ammunition for buying ammunition her son used in the killings.
By October 2013 he faced two cases in Douglas County District Court, later consolidated: four counts of first-degree murder, four of using a deadly weapon and six of possessing a weapon as a prohibited person. Jenkins stood mute at arraignment and not-guilty pleas were entered for him. Soon afterward he began writing to prosecutors, a judge and the Omaha World-Herald saying he wanted to plead guilty to spare the families "more misery and suffering sorrow of a trial." The court said it would not accept a guilty plea until state psychiatrists had examined him.
The experts divided. In November 2013 Dr. Bruce Gutnik, for the defense, diagnosed schizophrenia and found Jenkins not competent but able to be restored with treatment. At a hearing on February 12, 2014, Dr. Y. Scott Moore, for the State, said Jenkins understood the charges and the court process and pointed to his own legal filings; he believed Jenkins was mostly malingering. Dr. Oliveto, who did not assess competency, testified that he had seen thousands of inmates and that Jenkins was the most dangerous; "He's insane. He's a psychopath," he said, adding that Jenkins should never have been released. On February 20, 2014, Judge Peter Bataillon found Jenkins competent to stand trial. In March 2014 the judge found that he had knowingly and voluntarily given up his right to a lawyer and let him represent himself, with the public defender's office as advisory counsel.
Jenkins wanted to plead no contest. At a hearing in early April 2014 Bataillon refused, citing the seriousness of the case, and said Jenkins would have to plead guilty; Jenkins declined. On April 16, 2014, after changing his plea several times, Jenkins entered pleas of no contest to all counts, and the judge accepted them. He said his pleas were voluntary but not free. At points he spoke in what he said was the language of his serpent god. He disputed the State's account, saying that his body may have been involved but that he was not in control because of what he called psychotic mania, and that the voice of Apophis had ordered the killings. Prosecutors said he was faking the voices and that the real motive was robbery. The court accepted the State's factual basis and found him guilty on every count.
A no-contest plea does not admit the charges, but it allows the court to convict, and Bataillon did. Jenkins waived his right to have a jury decide the aggravating circumstances that could make him eligible for death and asked for a three-judge panel instead.
The sentencing took three more years. In July 2014, after his advisory counsel raised concerns, the court found Jenkins not competent to proceed to sentencing, out of what the Nebraska Supreme Court later called "an abundance of caution" given the disagreement between psychiatrists. In February and March 2015 a report by two clinical psychologists and a psychiatrist, Jennifer Cimpl Bohn, Rajeev Chaturvedi and Mario Scalora, diagnosed a personality disorder and malingering, and the court found him competent again in March 2015. In December 2015 Gutnik again found him incompetent. After a hearing that began in June 2016, the court found him competent on September 20, 2016, relying on Cimpl Bohn.
During this time he went on harming himself in custody, cutting his face, tongue and genitals. In April 2016 lawmakers questioned the corrections director, Scott Frakes, about how Jenkins had managed to swallow a prison employee's keys while under round-the-clock watch; Frakes acknowledged mistakes but said no one had been fired.
The death penalty itself changed under him. In May 2015 the Legislature repealed capital punishment, overriding Governor Pete Ricketts's veto by 30 votes to 19. Supporters gathered signatures for a referendum, which suspended the repeal, and in November 2016 nearly 61 percent of voters restored the death penalty. Jenkins's public defender, Thomas Riley, argued that the brief gap made a death sentence unconstitutional; the courts rejected that argument.
The three-judge panel, Judges Peter Bataillon, Terri Harder and Mark Johnson, began hearing evidence in November 2016. On the first day it ruled that Jenkins was not intellectually disabled, which would have barred execution. A prison psychologist had pointed to a 2003 screening score of 69, but conceded that it was not a formal IQ test and that childhood scores were above 70; a regional center psychologist, Cimpl Bohn, testified that he did not have an intellectual disability and diagnosed narcissistic personality disorder.
The State called the two people he had carjacked as a teenager and detective Schneider. Jenkins testified for about 40 minutes. He said the judge, lawyers and investigators were biased against him, that police had planted evidence and that he had confessed only to protect his mother, who had been arrested. He said he was innocent. He invited Kleine to question him; Kleine declined.
On November 16, 2016, the panel found six of the nine aggravating circumstances the State had alleged, among them that more than one murder was committed at Spring Lake Park and that Jenkins had a substantial prior history of serious assaultive or terrorizing criminal activity. It did not find beyond a reasonable doubt that the Spring Lake Park men and Andrea Kruger were killed to conceal a robbery. Riley argued that Jenkins's schizoaffective disorder, made worse by years in solitary confinement, should rule out death. Teri Roberts called Jenkins evil in her statement to the court.
On May 30, 2017, the panel sentenced Jenkins to death on each of the four murder counts and to consecutive terms of 45 to 50 years on each weapons count. "Each one of these murders was a planned and deliberate act," Bataillon said. The panel called the four killings over ten days "one of the worst killing sprees in the history of this state." It found no statutory mitigating circumstances and two nonstatutory ones, his bad childhood and his mental health, which it described as a personality disorder with narcissistic, antisocial and borderline features. It found the state psychiatrists credible: Jenkins had personality disorders but knew right from wrong. It declined to treat his solitary confinement as mitigating, finding that it was the result of his own actions and threats.
Over Jenkins's objection, the panel ordered Riley to handle the automatic appeal. "You're not doing my appeal," Jenkins told him. Velita Glasgow said, "It's time for me to heal." The Kruger family said only that they were glad it was over: "It's been a long time. Too long." In June 2017 Jenkins was moved to death row at the Tecumseh State Correctional Institution.
Four of Jenkins's relatives were convicted. His sister Erica Jenkins was found guilty in September 2014 of robbing Jorge Cajiga-Ruiz and Juan Uribe-Pena and was sentenced to 60 to 100 years. In January 2015 a jury convicted her of first-degree murder in the death of Curtis Bradford, and she was sentenced to life; the Nebraska Supreme Court affirmed that conviction in 2016. A court in York later added 20 to 40 years for beating Christine Bordeaux with a padlock in a sock in a cell they briefly shared in 2016. She was also charged in the Kruger killing, with a trial set for January 2015; how that charge was resolved has not been reported.
His mother, Lori Jenkins, received 10 years in federal prison in July 2014 for illegally buying ammunition her son used. In March 2015 Bataillon found her guilty, without a jury, of two counts of being an accessory, for concealing information about the ammunition purchase and helping dispose of clothing with gunshot residue, and acquitted her of a third; she received further consecutive state terms. Christine Bordeaux pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit robbery and attempted robbery and testified against her cousins in state and federal court; she was sentenced to 20 years in March 2016. Warren Levering pleaded no contest to being an accessory to Andrea Kruger's murder and to attempted robbery, apologized to her family, and was sentenced on February 26, 2016, to 40 years.
The ombudsman's report, dated January 6, 2014, concluded that the corrections department had missed several warnings about Jenkins's mental health, should have pursued more treatment and could have sought his commitment to a psychiatric hospital instead of releasing him. It also found that long segregation kept him out of programs that might have helped. The department disagreed and, citing litigation, gave a three-sentence reply.
In March 2014 the Legislature voted 31 to 0 for LR 424, introduced by Senator Steve Lathrop of Omaha, creating the Department of Correctional Services Special Investigative Committee. Lathrop said that "there should be accountability in state government." Its members were Senators Lathrop, Les Seiler, Ernie Chambers, Heath Mello, Bob Krist, Paul Schumacher and Kate Bolz. The committee also examined the department's miscalculation of hundreds of prisoners' sentences.
At a hearing on September 18, 2014, Oliveto testified that Jenkins had been "psychotic, delusional, and he told me he was going to kill people and I believed it." Weilage said he did not believe Jenkins was mentally ill and confirmed that he had not told the Johnson County prosecutor about Baker's diagnosis or the threats. The department's behavioral health administrator, Cameron White, said he did not recall reading Baker's report before the killings, and later testified that withholding it had been wrong. Chambers said that if commitment had been granted, "four people would still be walkin' this earth." In October 2014 Moreland and Davis testified about their own warnings.
The committee's report, adopted unanimously and issued on December 15, 2014, found that Weilage's decision to withhold Baker's report "resulted directly in the failure of Jenkins to be civilly committed," that he had breached his professional responsibility and, in the committee's opinion, had done so deliberately, and that "the failure to provide the information necessary to support a civil commitment directly resulted in the tragic death of four individuals in Omaha." It called the department's argument that Jenkins sought commitment for some secondary gain "absurd." It found that his long segregation "exacerbated his mental health problems, prevented him from receiving mental health treatment and any form of rehabilitative programming and, very simply, made him more angry and disturbed," and noted that he had managed in the general population of the Douglas County jail with proper care. It also said plainly that Jenkins "should be held accountable through the criminal justice system." It proposed 16 reforms and recommended that three administrators, Weilage among them, lose their jobs.
In 2015 the Legislature reappointed the committee under LR 34 to keep overseeing the department. On May 21, 2015, it passed LB 598, introduced by Schumacher, by 47 votes to 0. Schumacher told colleagues that the committee had found a lack of rules on solitary confinement had left Jenkins isolated for more than half his incarceration, likely causing psychological damage that contributed to the killings. From July 1, 2016, the law required the department to separate prisoners from the general population in "the least restrictive manner consistent with maintaining institutional order," banned solitary confinement defined as the loss of all sight and sound of other prisoners while permitting restrictive housing, and required a long-term plan and annual public reports on restrictive housing, including prisoners' mental illness diagnoses.
LB 598 also carried two other bills. From Mello's LB 606 it created an Office of Inspector General of the Nebraska Correctional System and required an overcrowding emergency to be declared from 2020 when prisons passed 140 percent of capacity. From Bolz's LB 592 it required mental health evaluations of every prisoner within two weeks of admission, treatment and re-evaluation before release, and allowed mentally ill and dangerous prisoners to be moved to outside psychiatric facilities. The same session passed LB 605, which added post-release supervision for lower-level felonies and set parole guidelines to ensure supervision after release. Jenkins's lawyers noted in 2019 that Nebraska law later barred placing prisoners with serious mental illness in restrictive housing from March 1, 2020.
Andrea Kruger's husband filed a 7.5 million dollar claim against the state in October 2013, and her estate sued in May 2014, arguing that officials knew Jenkins planned to kill at random. In February 2015 U.S. District Judge Lyle Strom dismissed the suit, finding the state immune because the decision to release Jenkins was discretionary.
On direct appeal Jenkins, represented by Riley, raised nine issues: that his pleas lacked a factual basis and a valid waiver of rights, that he should not have been allowed to represent himself, that he was not competent, that the panel failed to weigh his mental illness, his unanswered requests for commitment and the effects of solitary confinement, that Nebraska's judge-sentencing scheme violated the Sixth Amendment, that the 2015 repeal barred a death sentence, and that executing a seriously mentally ill man, or anyone, was cruel and unusual. The American Civil Liberties Union filed a brief in support on behalf of mental health organizations and experts.
On July 19, 2019, the Nebraska Supreme Court, in an opinion written by Judge Cassel (Judges Papik and Freudenberg did not take part), affirmed. "Many of the issues in this death penalty appeal turn on Jenkins' competency and mental health," the court wrote. It found the evidence on his mental health "abundant and highly conflicting" and saw no error in the lower court's reliance on testimony that he had a personality disorder and was feigning illness. "We are not persuaded that Jenkins suffers from a serious mental illness," it said. It held that a defendant need not agree with the factual basis for a no-contest plea, that "a waiver of counsel need not be prudent, just knowing and intelligent," that the repeal had never taken effect because the referendum petition suspended it, and that the Sixth Amendment did not require a jury to weigh mitigation. It found the panel had acted reasonably "in not rewarding his behavior by considering the resulting confinement as a mitigating factor." Rehearing was denied on August 9, 2019.
The ACLU then asked the U.S. Supreme Court to take the case, arguing that the state had refused to consider the effects of prolonged solitary confinement and that judges rather than juries had made the findings needed for death. "If the state executes this man, it will violate constitutional precedent and human decency," said David Cole, the ACLU's legal director. The Court denied review on April 20, 2020, without comment.
Jenkins filed for post-conviction relief in Douglas County District Court on May 18, 2020, claiming that his lawyers had been ineffective and that he was intellectually disabled. A new lawyer filed an amended motion on February 18, 2022. In May 2024 his lawyers asked for 50,000 dollars for a mitigation expert, saying his mental state was deteriorating and that he had cut open his own neck believing he was removing a tumor. Kruger's mother responded that "there is no study, no medication, no rehabilitating, and no amount of money that can fix it," and Bradford's mother called him an attention seeker. In September 2024 the defense argued that his trial-level lawyers should have pressed an insanity or intellectual disability defense; the State said the case was among the most scrutinized in Nebraska history.
On March 12, 2025, Jenkins filed a handwritten request asking the court to end his appeals and set an execution date. At a hearing on April 17, 2025, he appeared by video from Tecumseh and changed his mind; his lawyer, David Tank, called him "a really unpredictable person as a function of his mental illness." Bataillon denied funding for a new competency evaluation. At an October 20, 2025, hearing the defense asked for new IQ testing, noting that his three IQ tests were all more than ten years old, and the State called the request a fishing expedition.
On January 20, 2026, Bataillon denied all seven of Jenkins's post-conviction claims without a hearing. He noted, among other things, that Jenkins had been found incompetent at one point anyway, that he had repeatedly said he wanted to plead guilty, that his lawyers had presented extensive mental health evidence and that they had filed an intellectual disability motion on November 8, 2016. Kleine called it "a step in the right direction." On February 12, 2026, Jenkins filed his own motion to dismiss the post-conviction case and told the court he no longer wanted his lawyers. His lawyers argued that he was not fit to make that choice. Asked by the judge, Jenkins said: "yes...I stand competent." In a ruling reported on May 19, 2026, the court accepted that he was no longer interested in seeking post-conviction relief and denied his lawyers' requests for a competency evaluation and to amend the dismissal order. No federal habeas corpus case has been reported.
In May 2026 Jenkins was on death row at the Tecumseh State Correctional Institution, where he had been held since 2017; he was 39 in February 2026. Nebraska's death penalty remains law, but the state has been unable to obtain the drugs for lethal injection; its most recent execution was in 2018. In March 2025 WOWT reported 11 men on Nebraska's death row and noted that the department generally starts with the longest-serving prisoners.
Proven by his no-contest pleas and the court's findings, and final on direct appeal: the four first-degree murders and the weapons counts.
Motive: prosecutors said the killings were planned to carry out robberies and the carjacking or to stop victims identifying him. Jenkins said Apophis ordered human sacrifices. The sentencing panel did not find beyond a reasonable doubt that the Spring Lake Park killings and Andrea Kruger's killing were committed to conceal a robbery.
Mental illness: defense psychiatrists diagnosed schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder or bipolar disorder; the State's experts and the Lincoln Regional Center psychologists found personality disorders and feigned illness. The courts sided with the State's experts. The legislative committee, by contrast, treated him as mentally ill and called his requests for commitment genuine.
His own account: in 2014 he wanted to plead guilty and disputed only his mental state; by 2016 he said he was innocent and had confessed to protect his mother. No court accepted that claim.
Details that vary between sources: whether Bradford was killed late on August 18 or on August 19 (KLKN gives August 18 for the robbery plan; the court and the AP give August 19 as the date he was found); the intersection where Bradford was found (18th and Clark Streets in the Supreme Court opinion; 18th and Curtis in an early KPTM report); where Kruger's SUV was burned (near 43rd and Charles, KPTM; an alley near 43rd and Hamilton, KMTV); and how long after his release the killings began, given variously as 10 days, 11 days and two weeks. The release date of July 30, 2013, and the killing dates are consistent across sources.
Not established: a further shooting police were investigating in November 2013; no details or charge were ever made public.
Age 7: first placed in Nebraska foster care.
1995: psychiatric evaluation at age 8.
August 2001: sent to the Youth Rehabilitation and Treatment Center, Kearney, at 14.
2002: armed carjackings in north Omaha.
November 11, 2003: enters the Nebraska Correctional Youth Facility on robbery and weapon convictions, 14 to 15 years.
July 4, 2005: first segregation stay after a near riot.
2006: second-degree assault conviction adds two years.
June 8, 2007: moved to Tecumseh and placed in administrative confinement.
July 30, 2009: Dr. Natalie Baker diagnoses a psychotic disorder.
December 17, 2009: attempted escape during a funeral trip.
December 1, 2010: therapist recommends regional center treatment.
July 11, 2011: two to four more years for assaulting a corrections employee; total 18 to 21 years.
May 2, 2012: writes "Apophis evil Nikko" in blood on his cell wall.
February 4, 2013: Baker finds him "an imminent danger to others."
February 17 and 18, 2013: grievances asking for protective custody and hospitalization dismissed.
February 25, 2013: Johnson County prosecutor asks about commitment; Baker's report is not sent.
March 15, 2013: moved to the Nebraska State Penitentiary.
July 30, 2013: discharged from segregation with no supervision.
August 11, 2013: Jorge Cajiga-Ruiz and Juan Uribe-Pena killed at Spring Lake Park.
August 19, 2013: Curtis Bradford killed.
August 21, 2013: Andrea Kruger killed at 168th and Fort Streets.
August 29, 2013: arrested on a terroristic threats complaint.
September 4, 2013: charged with four murders.
November 2013: letters saying he wants to plead guilty; Gutnik finds him incompetent.
January 6, 2014: ombudsman's report.
February 20, 2014: found competent to stand trial.
March 2014: allowed to represent himself; Legislature creates the LR 424 committee.
April 16, 2014: no-contest pleas; found guilty on all counts.
July 2014: found not competent for sentencing; mother sentenced to 10 years in federal prison.
September 18, 2014: legislative hearing with the psychiatrists and Weilage.
December 15, 2014: committee report.
January 2015: Erica Jenkins convicted of Bradford's murder.
February 2015: federal judge dismisses the Kruger family's lawsuit.
March 2015: found competent again.
May 2015: Legislature repeals the death penalty and passes LB 598.
February 26, 2016: Warren Levering sentenced to 40 years.
March 2016: Christine Bordeaux sentenced to 20 years.
September 20, 2016: found competent for sentencing.
November 2016: voters restore the death penalty; sentencing hearing; six aggravators found.
May 30, 2017: sentenced to death on four counts.
July 19, 2019: Nebraska Supreme Court affirms.
April 20, 2020: U.S. Supreme Court denies review.
May 18, 2020: post-conviction motion filed.
March 12, 2025: asks to be executed; withdraws the request April 17, 2025.
January 20, 2026: post-conviction claims denied.
February 12, 2026: moves to dismiss his own post-conviction case.
May 2026: court accepts the withdrawal and denies a competency evaluation.
October 19, 2026: on death row at Tecumseh; no later ruling found.