In retrial over killing, mother tells of fears for slain son
In emotional testimony Thursday, family members of a murdered 21- year- old Knoxville man recounted the final days before he was killed in a Carrick house and then dismembered in 1996. It marked the second day of a new trial for one of two men convicted of killing him.
In 1997, Scott Godesky was found guilty of fatally shooting drug dealer Brian Mirenna, dismembering him, and helping to bury his body parts in a shallow grave. Both Godesky and co- defendant David Lehrman were sentenced to life in prison.
On Thursday, Mirenna’s mother, Jeannie Seifert, recalled a “not- so- good group” of friends with which her son sometimes surrounded himself — a group that included Lehrman, she said.
“I didn’t really know those friends,” Ms. Seifert said, adding she did not allow them to come to her home. “Dave was the only one I knew anything of.”
“I begged [ Mirenna] every day to get out of that,” she added. “I was deathly afraid.”
Rani Huff, Mirenna’s fiancee at the time, said she knew Lehrman well prior to Mirenna’s murder — he had once slept on their couch for a few weeks — but she “didn’t even know [ Godesky] existed.”
She recounted the final phone conversation she had with Mirenna on the night of his death. He told her he had gone to Lehrman’s house for a party, but was sick at the time and promised to come home early. The couple had recently moved into the home of Ms. Huff’s family because they “felt unsafe” in their apartment, Ms. Huff said.
When Ms. Huff woke up in the middle of the night to find Mirenna still gone, she got “a sick feeling in [ her] stomach,” she testified.
Mirenna didn’t answer his pager, so she drove to Lehrman’s house, where she saw sheets covering the windows and a figure inside hunched over, running and carrying something. Lehrman came to the door and told her Mirenna had gone to steal a car, she recalled, and she heard a male voice she couldn’t recognize say, “Don’t let her in.”
“I pounded on the door and was asking for Brian,” she said. “I tried to push my way into the house. … Dave wouldn’t let me in.”
In 2008, Lehrman sent Godesky a letter apologizing for pinning the crime on him, setting off a chain of events that helped Godesky appeal his conviction and earn a new trial.
That trial began Wednesday in Allegheny County Common Pleas Court. Godesky faces homicide, conspiracy and robbery charges, in addition to an abuse of a corpse charge that he will concede.
In addition to calling Mirenna’s family to testify, Allegheny County Assistant District Attorney Jonathan Lusty called to the stand a slew of detectives involved in the original 1996 investigation.