CONWAY -- A defense attorney said Thursday, on the first day of the capital murder trial of a Pine Bluff man, that the kidnapping and killing of a Wooster woman while she shopped in Conway was "boys playing around," and things got out of hand.
Defense attorney William "Bill" James Jr. didn't mince words when he followed Prosecuting Attorney Carol Crews in opening statements in the death-penalty trial of 20-year-old Tacori Mackrell in the 2018 killing of Elvia Fragstein.
"Tacori Mackrell was a part of this," he said.
The case was "not as intricate" as one might think, James told the jury.
"It happened. It got out of hand. It got ugly," James said, following up with stories of Mackrell's troubled childhood with a largely absent father, a life filled with street drugs and lack of parental compassion.
"No one took care of him," James said.
Mackrell is charged with capital murder, kidnapping, robbery and theft of property.
The jury of eight women and four men, plus three women and two men serving as alternates, sat 6 feet apart, with empty chairs around them wrapped in black garbage bags and the first four rows of the public gallery cordoned off with a cubicle wall as pandemic precautions. The jurors, as well as the legal teams and the audience, wore masks.
The courtroom of Faulkner County Circuit Judge Troy Braswell Jr. was moved temporarily to the fourth floor to accommodate the spacing needs.
Crews addressed the jury, not sparing any detail in Fragstein's death on July 7, 2018.
"This was not the average kidnapping," Crews said. "You're going to hear that it was much more violent than anyone can imagine."
Investigators believe Fragstein was shopping at the Conway Commons Shopping Center on July 7, 2018, when she was abducted by Mackrell, 18, at the time, and his cousin, Robert Smith II, who was 16 at the time.
Fragstein's body was found by a farmer on July 11, 2018, on a rural road near Pine Bluff.
"Her body was thrown off like a piece of road trash," Crews said.
An autopsy revealed that she had suffered broken ribs, a fractured cervical vertebra and a crushed throat.
Crews detailed how Mackrell changed his story numerous times during the interrogation by investigators, at first denying that he had ever been in Conway, then saying that a third man affiliated with a gang had forced the pair to kill Fragstein. Mackrell claimed that he was in the back seat when Fragstein was hit and beaten.
He "last heard her moan," he told investigators, when they hit Little Rock on their way to Pine Bluff.
"It was a prolonged, vicious attack of a 72-year-old woman," Crews said, describing Fragstein's eight broken ribs, injuries "consistent with a stomping," her crushed windpipe and a high-impact blow to her cervical spine with what experts suspect was a tire iron.
Smith and Mackrell were arrested July 16, a day before Fragstein's vehicle was found destroyed by fire in a grassy area in Jefferson County, more than 80 miles from where Fragstein had last been seen alive.
The prosecution called 12 witnesses to testify before the court recessed for the day at 4:30 p.m. Of those witnesses, James and defense attorney Jeff Rosenzweig cross-examined only four and only briefly.
The prosecution's first witness was Fragstein's husband, Helmut Fragstein, who told how his wife got up that morning and made coffee and breakfast, then the couple met in the television room to eat the meal on tray tables.
"It was a beautiful, sunshine day," Helmut Fragstein, a German native, said in broken English.
After getting dressed to go shopping, Elvia Fragstein went out to the shop where her husband was tinkering on a project.
"She was the most beautiful thing," Helmut Fragstein said, breaking into sobs before crying out, "Mi Amor!"
"She gave me a kiss and left," he said.
He began to worry when his wife had not returned home by 5 p.m. He left his shop and went into the house, running from room to room, calling her name, he said.
Still, he thought maybe she had gone to another shopping mall or stopped by the liquor store to pick up beer. Elvia did not carry a cellphone.
When it grew dark, he knew something was wrong. He called 911.
Faulkner County sheriff's office investigator Andy Cook began his search by using credit card receipts to follow Elvia Fragstein's path.
The prosecution showed the jury several minutes of security camera footage with Elvia Fragstein leaving a store and another showing her vehicle driving erratically across the parking lot.
Smith and Mackrell also are seen on video footage walking around the shopping center.
Crews took scissors to cut open evidence packages that contained a pair of tennis shoes, ripped jeans and an airbrushed shirt that investigators found at Smith's home.
In the surveillance videos, Smith can be seen wearing those shirt, pants and shoes, with Mackrell beside him in jeans and a white T-shirt.
The tennis shoes tested positive for Elvia Fragstein's blood, the prosecution said.
Smith is charged as an adult but is exempt from the death penalty because he was under 18 at the time he is suspected of committing the crime. He is awaiting trial.
Mackrell's and Smith's cases were separated in the fall of 2018 after Smith's attorney argued that Mackrell had implicated himself, Smith and a third person in the crime.
The prosecution's case continues at 9 a.m. today