Witness Places Suspect Near Bombing Others Describe Terror Of Robbery At U.S. Bank Branch In Valley

A woman who once let Verne Jay Merrell live in her home spotted him near a Spokane Valley newspaper office a half-hour before it was bombed last spring, a jury heard Wednesday.

Denise Derrickson testified that she saw Merrell in a Tidyman’s grocery store, staring at an aisle display, about 2 p.m. on April 1.

At 2:36 p.m. a pipe bomb exploded outside the rear door of The Spokesman-Review office, across McDonald Road from the store.

Merrell, 51, is one of three North Idaho bombing and bank robbery suspects on trial in U.S. District Court in Spokane.

Merrell, Robert S. Berry, 42, and Charles H. Barbee, 45, are charged with three bombings and two bank robberies in the Valley last April and July.

Prosecutors claim Barbee and Berry left bombs at the newspaper, a Planned Parenthood clinic and a U.S. Bank branch, and twice robbed the bank. They say Merrell was the getaway driver.

Defense attorneys contend the government’s key informant committed the crimes, then set the trio up for a $130,000 reward.

Derrickson is the second person in two days of trial testimony to place Merrell near the scene of the newspaper bombing.

Kelly Gibbons, a former Spokesman-Review circulation worker, testified Tuesday that he watched through a window as a masked man dropped a bomb in an outer stairwell. The bomber scrambled into a white van where Merrell waited behind the wheel, he said.

Derrickson testified that she knew Merrell as “Jay Sherman,” an alias used by the defendant, according to prosecutors. The witness provided a photograph of Merrell taken four years ago at her son’s birthday party.

Derrickson said she and her husband met Merrell when they hired him in 1990 to fix the leaky roof of their Sandpoint home.

When they later moved to the Valley, the Derricksons hired Merrell again to build a deck. They let Merrell move in to save him the commute.

“He was like a friend to us,” Derrickson testified, adding that Merrell often shot pool with her husband.

That apparently changed one day in 1993.

Derrickson said she and Merrell were in her kitchen watching television coverage of the fire at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. He grew belligerent, pounding his fist on the counter and shouting.

“He said he knew people there and that a lot of his friends had died,” Derrickson told the jury.

The episode frightened Derrickson. She and her husband decided that when Merrell’s work was done, they’d have nothing more to do with him, she testified.

When she saw him at the grocery store last April 1, Derrickson “turned away in a kind of panic,” she said.

A few minutes later, feeling foolish, she went back to the aisle to say hello. Merrell was gone.

“I just know it was him,” Derrickson testified.

A half-hour later, she pulled into her driveway 11 blocks away and heard the explosion, Derrickson said. She thought little of it until she saw a composite sketch of a suspect days later that resembled Merrell. She informed authorities.

The same men are alleged to have robbed U.S. Bank minutes after that bombing.

Tearful witnesses Wednesday said the robbers were loud and threatening.

Bank teller Lynn Anderson testified she was counting money and preparing to end her shift when two masked gunman in military parkas barged in the front doors.

One leveled a pistol at her and demanded she point out the “head teller,” she said.

“I froze,” she told the jury. “The head teller is a good friend of mine. I remember thinking, ‘The bank would want me to tell. I need to tell.’ But I was truly horrified.”

Head teller Tracy Lafayette stepped forward, Anderson testified.

The robber waved Anderson to a far corner of the bank, where customers and employees stood, noses to the wall, while a second robber held a gun to their backs, Anderson said. She recalled random sounds: ringing phones, metal cash drawers clinking open.

“That was the worst part of the experience,” she said. “It’s the most vulnerable feeling you can imagine. I truly believed we were going to die.”

Lafayette told the jury she emptied a drawer of bills and stuffed them in the robber’s satchel. She told him that was everything then walked past the locked bank vault. She paused, returned to the vault and opened it.

“I knew he would see the lock in that door,” she testified, crying. “I pictured him shooting me in the back for lying.”

Both women later left their jobs.

Lafayette testified that moments after the July 12 robbery she turned to a supervisor and resigned.

“I told her ‘never again. I’m done. I quit.”’ She hasn’t worked there since.

The three men are charged with a dozen felonies and face mandatory life sentences and up to $3 million in fines if convicted. Testimony in the domestic terrorism trial is expected to last four to six weeks.

, DataTimes