Lewis County Sirens.com

By Sharyn  L. Decker
Lewis County Sirens news reporter

CHEHALIS – In a week, 23-year-old Jessica Porter will be burying her father’s ashes in the grave where her only brother was laid to rest almost a year ago.

A memorial service will be held in a cemetery in The Dalles, Ore. for David West Sr. 52, and his son David West Jr., 16, on Aug. 21, the one-year anniversary of their deaths in their Salkum-Onalaska area home.

The two were shot to death, along with a 50-year-old from Randle; while West. Sr.’s live-in girlfriend was seriously wounded by a gunshot. It’s a case that has more questions than answers, as far as Porter is concerned.

The Lewis County Sheriff’s Office have called the homicides related to a drug debt collection, but Porter doesn’t buy that.

“We think there’s a lot more to it than anybody knows,” Porter said.

Porter, a young mother of two who calls the Randle area home even though she lives in a county on the other side of the mountains now, has been anxious for the case to move along.

Two men were charged last year in the deaths and have trials scheduled for this autumn. She got word the end of July that prosecutors made a plea deal with one of them. It wasn’t something she was happy with, but it gave her hope that meant one would testify against the other.

But the week before last in Lewis County Superior Court, murder defendant Ryan McCarthy and his lawyer were moving forward toward an Oct. 10 trial.

Exactly what happened isn’t clear. Elected Lewis County Prosecutor Jonathan Meyer only said “You’d have to ask his attorney.”

Olympia defense attorney Rick Cordes said he had a deal with Chief Criminal Deputy Prosecutor Brad Meagher, but something changed after Meagher left for vacation.

“We had an agreement,” Cordes said. “But somebody added a condition onto it.”

Early last month, Cordes and Meagher said they had negotiated a plea deal for McCarthy. The 29-year-old was going to plead down from three counts of first-degree murder to two counts of second-degree assault, Cordes said.

When they showed up in court in mid-July, the deal was off.

Porter says she doesn’t know what to think after it happened a second time.

If McCarthy was not the shooter, as she’s inclined to believe, she’s not opposed to plea bargaining, she said.

“All I can hope is they do get a deal to where he testifies, so they don’t have to drag it out for years and years and years, or Booth gets off,” Porter said. “It’s something that will never go away, but the sooner they get (convicted) the sooner I’ll get feeling better.”

John A. Booth Jr., 32, is the other man charged with murder in the case. The former Onalaska resident and McCarthy were previously prison cell mates.

Both are charged with murder of West Sr., David Jr. and 50-year-old Tony E. Williams of Randle who was at the house that night. Booth is charged with attempted murder of Denise Salts, then 51.

The two men are also charged with attempted extortion of West. Sr.

Porter has heard a lot of different stories and gained more insight about what might have been behind Booth and McCarthy’s alleged visit to her dad’s home that night.

It’s left her scared for herself, and wishing she knew more earlier, so she could have taken her younger brother with her when she left after a visit to Lewis County just two weeks before they were killed.

“He had a lot of family that really loved him and cared,” Porter said of her brother. “He wasn’t a bad kid, he was a good kid. He was the one that was gonna go to college.”

David Jr., who was called D.J., has tons of aunts, uncles and cousins in Oklahoma, his sister said.

Their mother lives near Porter’s home, and D.J. has a half sister whom Porter has not been able to find.

D.J. lived in Morton when he attended elementary school. She went to White Pass High School, she said.

Then, he lived with his mother in Oklahoma until he was about 13,  and he wanted to go live with his dad again in Lewis County, his older sister said.

He was a 16-year-old who got what one of his class mates at Onalaska High School described as “amazing grades”.

Though the two of them don’t share the same father, Porter said she doesn’t consider D.J. a half brother, or West Sr. a step-father.

“He was my brother straight out, no half in there for me,” Porter wrote in an email exchange.

West Sr. is her father, as far as she’s concerned, although not biologically and despite the fact he and her mother didn’t marry.

He worked for a forest products company in North Bend and transferred to Morton long ago, she said. The past few years, he bought, rebuilt and sold cars.

Porter, her two children and her boyfriend were visiting from out of town on August 8 of last year when Robbie Russell, Booth and McCarthy showed up at her dad’s home off Gore Road. Her father only knew Russell, not the other two, she said. After the men left, her father told her to leave.

“My dad told me go home, you need to go home, and I asked why,” Porter said. “He said, you just need to go.”

Porter told authorities her father told her he had to pay Russell $1,000 to get him to leave, and that he was being blackmailed, according to charging documents in the case.

Russell back last August was named a person of interest in the homicides but was never charged. He’s in prison now on unrelated crimes.

One of the reasons prosecutors gave a judge for a warrant to bring Russell in, was his visit to the West’s house was a violation of a no-contact order from a case in which West Sr. was a witness against Russell.

In hindsight, Porter thinks her dad was afraid after that visit and that he, and maybe others, knew something bad was going to happen, she said.

Now, almost a year later, she still can’t stop imagining over and over what took place the night her brother and father were shot. She worries about her anxiety and depression getting in the way of her being a parent to her two little girls.

There are so many unanswered questions that nag at her.

“If I would have known anything was gonna go down I would have went and got my brother out of that place but I didn’t know,” she wrote.

Porter doesn’t know why Booth and McCarthy would have returned on August 21.

“There’s a lot of weird things in the case,” she said. “I want to know what they were getting out of going there.”

McCarthy’s trial is scheduled for Oct. 10. Booth’s trial is set for November.

Tags: By Sharyn L. Decker, news reporter

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 14th, 2011 at 6:29 pm and is filed under Top story of the day. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.