In the hills above California’s Wine Country, a teen girl held her 2-year-old son for the last time, then handed his lifeless body to her accused pimp, she testified at a recent court hearing.
The man allegedly dug a three-foot, unmarked grave on the side of a secluded Napa County road and placed Jamari Madkins, the boy he is suspected of killing, inside. They then drove to the East Bay.
The then-17-year-old girl, identified in court records as Jane Doe, returned to the life she’d known she was first trafficked at age 13, sleeping in cars or cheap motels throughout high-prostitution areas of Northern California, her trafficker always nearby. Unable to grieve her son in silence — and with nowhere else to turn — she began to confide her trauma in strangers who would pay $100 to sexually abuse her for a few minutes each day, she testified at a September hearing.
“I just remember telling them, like, ‘I’m going through something really crazy right now,’” Doe said in court. “They would be like, ‘Oh try to leave that dude.’”
Doe’s tragic life story, as she described it under oath, was detailed over two days on the witness stand at a preliminary hearing, when she testified against 25-year-old Keonte Harris, an Antioch resident who faces life in prison if convicted on charges of beating Jamari to death and trafficking Doe. She is a key witness in the Alameda County District Attorney’s prosecution of Harris, whose attorney has taken aim at the credibility of Doe’s account of the days leading up to the toddler’s burial in rural Napa County.
Now 20, Doe testified that she grew up in an abusive household in Solano County, and was attending middle school when a man in his 30s first trafficked her around the Bay Area. By age 14, she was pregnant with Jamari. By 15, she was a mother. By 17, she was homeless, her only source of income hinged on how many times she was willing to put up with sexual abuse by paying strangers. Typically, it was three per day, she testified.
The lead up to her son’s violent death, she testified, began around Thanksgiving 2022, after the then-17-year-old reconnected with Harris, a childhood friend who she says she fell in love with that year. The two discussed plans to travel and spend a life together, but their interactions were rife with abuse and violence, according to testimony. It came to an end just two days before Christmas that year, when she was detained by police in San Pablo and Harris was arrested, court records show.
On Dec. 7, 2022, the last day of Jamari’s life, Doe testified that she woke up in a Motel 6 in Stockton and loaded her toddler into Harris’ BMW. They stopped at a McDonalds to buy the boy a Happy Meal on the way to “The Blade” on Oakland’s International Boulevard, widely known as the Bay Area’s most violent and notorious open air sex market, where police routinely find teen girls walking the streets at night, according to court records.
Before leaving her son, she took one last look at him, she said on the stand.
“He had a gray sweater on and a yellow top and his jeans and some blue Crocs and a green bottle, a milk bottle, and I filled it up before leaving,” she testified.
At the very moment the boy was being beaten to death, Doe was in a car on a “date” with a man, she said.
When she returned, her son was dead. A children’s hospital doctor testified Jamari suffered 22 bruises on his head and died from blunt force trauma. She testified she attempted CPR, checked for signs of life and found nothing. She continued to hold him as it sunk in that Jamari was dead. The only explanation she got from Harris was that “my son hit his head, he passed out,” she said. They then drove blocks away to Highland Hospital.
“(Harris) tells me to leave my son in front of the hospital and they’ll take him … I was screaming. Like, I was holding my son, ‘No, I’m not doing that. I’m not doing that,’” Doe testified.
So they drove to a Fairfield apartment complex where they’d lived weeks earlier, and met up with 24-year-old Joel Saavedra, whose attorney says was manipulated into coming along and didn’t know he was being beckoned to bury a dead child. The three drove to Napa County, in a wooded area with no streetlights, and dug a three-foot hole for Jamari. During the burial, Doe said Harris remarked he should probably leave her in a hole out there too, she testified.
“I also do remember him saying that he should have shot (Jamari) to make it look like an accident,” Doe said on the stand.
Police discovered the body weeks later, buried in a remote part of Napa County, after Harris was arrested in San Pablo.
Now, with Harris’ child assault causing death and human trafficking case headed to trial, his defense attorney has taken aim at Doe’s credibility, calling her a serial liar who admitted telling numerous falsehoods to police along the way.
“This case relies 1,000 percent on Jane Doe’s credibility and … she is not reliable,” Alameda County Assistant Public Defender Jennie Otis argued at the preliminary hearing. “She will admit she lies when she is caught, but she will not admit she lies, and she continues to lie.”
Her description of the burial is one of the lies Doe now admits she told police, having originally claimed she was in Oakland while all this was going on. Further complicating matters, Doe was interviewed by Phong Tran, a then-Oakland detective who has since been charged with perjury for allegedly coercing witnesses into falsely incriminating murder defendants. His case is still pending.
At the September hearing’s end, Judge Clifford Blakely said that he was “under no illusion that Jane Doe is a perfect witness, a good witness even,” but that her testimony was backed by other evidence, like jail calls where Harris and Saavedra discussed the toddler’s death.
For prosecutors, it is a simple affair — a case where a man “brutally murdered (Jamari) with his fists” then took advantage of a grieving teen mom’s trauma to squeeze even more money out of the girl.
“There is no greater force, fear or duress … She knew that he could already kill somebody and bury the body with no remorse,” Deputy District Attorney Alexis Causey said at the hearing. “She had nowhere to go. She had no idea what to do. She was a child.”