Prosecutor to jury: I recall doc's killing, 'as a woman, as a citizen'

PROSECUTOR Jennifer Selber remembers the day in January 2013 when Melissa Ketunuti, a 35-year-old doctor who dedicated her life's work to caring for sick children, was found strangled, bound and burned in the basement of her Southwest Center City apartment.

But it's not because she's an assistant district attorney, Selber told a jury of six women and six men yesterday during her closing argument at the trial of murder suspect Jason Smith.

"I remember the day that Dr. Melissa Ketunuti was killed. Not as a prosecutor, but as a woman and as a citizen of this city," Selber said. "I remember it as the day we stopped feeling safe."

Prosecutors contend that Smith, 39, a father of two who worked as an exterminator, strangled Ketunuti in a fit of rage when he visited her rowhouse on Naudain Street near 18th on Jan. 21, 2013, for a call about a mouse problem.

He is accused of then wringing the 5-foot, 115-pound Children's Hospital of Philadelphia pediatrician's neck tightly with a belt, binding her feet and hands with horseback-riding equipment and setting her body ablaze in her dank, unfinished basement.

Both Smith - who took the stand for his defense Monday and was cross-examined by Selber yesterday - and his attorney, J. Michael Farrell, have argued that he simply had the unlucky chance of being the last person other than her killer who saw Ketunuti alive.

Throughout his five-day trial, Smith and his attorney have contended that when he confessed to the crime after he was arrested two days later, he did so under duress and after homicide detectives had roughed him up.

On the stand yesterday, Smith told Selber that he broke down and confessed to detectives after about five hours of intense questioning because one detective slammed him into a wall and grabbed him by the neck, and he feared that if he didn't "give them what they wanted," they would beat him.

"I wasn't beaten," Smith said. "I just wanted it to stop before that happened."

Selber rebuffed Smith's claim that his confession was false, asking him how he knew details that were so specific to Ketunuti's grisly murder that not even investigators were fully aware of them yet - for example, that she was dead before she was bound and set ablaze.

"How did you know this gruesome order of events?" Selber pressed.

In his closing argument, Farrell implored the jury to acquit Smith, reminding jurors numerous times that no DNA evidence linked Smith to the crime and asking them to disregard Smith's confession, contending that it was made in a moment of despair crafted by detectives who held him for hours in a "windowless room" and threatened him.

"Innocent people sometimes confess to crimes they did not commit," Farrell argued.

Selber and Assistant District Attorney Peter Lim have said that in two medical examinations after his interrogation, Smith showed no signs of nor complained of the police brutality he alleges.

The defense also contended that investigators had been lax when they did not perform trace-evidence testing on the clothing and boots Smith had been wearing the day of Ketunuti's killing, and that they failed to take a hard look at other potential suspects, including an ex-boyfriend.

Selber passionately defended detectives' work on the case, saying they worked around the clock in the days after the murder, when they had very little to go on, and meticulously eliminated several friends and associates of the doctor as they zeroed in on Smith.

The prosecutor scoffed at the idea that not testing Smith's clothing was an oversight, asking why they would perform tests that would show that Smith was in Ketunuti's home when he already conceded that he'd been in her home.

"Did you hear him yelling and screaming about the boots?" Selber asked the jury, referring to Farrell's argument that investigators failed to test the work boots Smith wore that day. "Why would we be spending commonwealth money to test boots that we all agree were in the basement?"

As for Smith's confession, Selber played a recording of a phone call between Smith and his fiancee, Shannon Mooney, in which he told her that it was a good decision on his part not to let detectives get his statement on video or audio.

"I said, 'F--- no, I'm not putting it on tape!' " Smith says in the call.

"Does that sound like someone who was forced?" Selber asked jurors.

"Do you know why Jason Smith confessed?" she continued later. "Because he was confronted with an overwhelming amount of evidence against him."

She asked the jury to convict Smith of first-degree murder, saying that the 1 to 1 1/2 minutes it would have taken him to "strangle the life out of" Ketunuti more than establishes his specific intent to kill her. He also is charged with third-degree murder, arson and related offenses.

This morning, Judge Sandy L.V. Byrd will instruct the jurors in rules of law, and they will begin deliberating.