Brother and Sister: The Jenkins Siblings and the Omaha Killings of August 2013

“Turn off your phones.”

According to his sister, that’s what Nikko Jenkins told everyone in the car. It was the night of August 18, 2013, in Omaha, and he was driving his girlfriend’s car toward an area known as “the bottoms.”

Curtis Bradford, 22, sat beside him up front. In the back sat two of Nikko’s sisters, Erica Jenkins and Lori “Lolo” Sayles.

The two men were dressed in black. There was a rifle in the car, and a shortened shotgun.

By morning, Bradford was dead. Nikko later pleaded no contest to his murder and three others. Erica was convicted of Bradford’s murder largely on the testimony of her own family.

Sources for this section: 1, 4, 5, 7

The people lost that August

Juan Uribe-Pena was 26. Jorge Cajiga-Ruiz was 29. Curtis Bradford was 22. Andrea Kruger was 33.

That is nearly all the public record holds about them. The court opinions describe where they were found and who was convicted. They don’t say what these four people did for a living, who waited for them at home, or what anyone said about them at their funerals.

Sources for this section: 4

The family

The Jenkins family was large, and most of what the courts would learn about that August came from inside it. There was Erica. Her brother, Nikko. Her sisters, Lori “Lolo” Sayles and Melonie Jenkins. A cousin, Brian Easterling. Another cousin, Christine Bordeaux. And their mother, also named Lori Jenkins.

Earlier that year, in February, someone fired shots at Erica’s home.

Sources for this section: 1, 8

Near the park

On the night of August 10, Bordeaux would later testify, Nikko came up with a plan. She and Erica would lure men to a place where he could rob them.

Early on August 11, Uribe-Pena and Cajiga-Ruiz were found in a pickup truck near a park in Omaha. Both had been shot in the head, and their wallets were gone. Nikko was convicted of murdering them.

Sources for this section: 2

The kitchen and the car

A week later, Nikko walked into his mother’s house with Curtis Bradford and a rifle.

Sayles was at the house with Erica on August 18 when the two men arrived. She watched them examine the rifle in the kitchen. When their mother came home, Bradford wrapped the rifle in a jacket and put it behind the couch.

Soon after, around 11:30 or midnight, Sayles, Nikko and Bradford left the house, and Erica went after them. Nikko drove. Bradford rode up front. Erica and Sayles sat in back.

Sayles testified that Nikko and Bradford talked about a robbery on the way, and that Nikko told everyone to turn off their phones as they got close to “the bottoms.”

Sources for this section: 1

The driveway

Nikko backed into a driveway on Clark Street, between Florence Boulevard and 18th Street.

Three people got out. Nikko carried the shortened shotgun. Bradford carried the rifle. Erica went with them. Sayles said she did not see Erica with a gun that night.

Sayles stayed in the car. Nikko told her to move to the driver’s seat.

From her seat she heard about 30 to 45 seconds of quiet. One shot. Then about fifteen seconds of nothing. Then a second shot, louder than the first. She saw a flash in the rearview mirror.

She didn’t see who fired. She never said she did.

Three people walked up that driveway. Two came back running.

Sources for this section: 1

After midnight

Brian Easterling testified that Erica and Nikko showed up at his house around 1 a.m. He said they washed the rifle there.

He said Erica was upset with Nikko. The way he told it, she had shot Bradford first, and then Nikko shot him. He said she took a revolver out of her purse.

Melonie Jenkins later told a jury something close to that. Erica described shooting Bradford in the back of the head with a revolver, and Nikko following with the shotgun.

Neither Easterling nor Melonie saw the shooting. Both were describing what they said Erica told them.

Around 7 a.m. on August 19, someone called emergency services. Bradford was outside, near a garage around 18th and Clark. He was dead.

Neighbors later said they’d heard gunshots the night before. Some put it around 10:30. Others said closer to midnight. The record never settles on one time.

Prosecutors would argue Erica wanted revenge for that February shooting at her home, and that she believed someone associated with Bradford was responsible. Nothing in the record shows Bradford had anything to do with it.

Sources for this section: 1

The slug

Investigators recovered a Brenneke-brand shotgun slug at the scene.

The lead detective went looking for where it came from. He found only one store in the area that sold that particular model of shell. Police released a surveillance image of its most recent buyer.

The woman in the picture was Lori Jenkins. Erica and Nikko’s mother.

That led police to Nikko, who was arrested around August 29. In his Birch Street apartment, officers found a shortened shotgun and a rifle in a gym bag, partly under a bed. Sayles identified them as the guns the two men carried that night.

Erica, Melonie and their mother were arrested around the same time. The court later noted there was no evidence connecting Erica to that apartment.

The smaller bullet could have come from a 9 mm, a .38 or a .357, and a database search turned up 26 possible guns. Bradford’s DNA was strongly linked to the rifle and to blood in the car. Mixed DNA on the rifle couldn’t rule out Erica or several relatives, but the analyst admitted that result carried very little weight.

Sources for this section: 1

Verdicts

Sayles first told police Nikko carried both weapons back to the car. Later she said Erica carried the rifle, and admitted she’d been trying to protect her sister.

Sayles and Melonie also described a later argument between Erica and their mother differently. One said it began over a niece damaging a plant. The other said it was about the killing.

Nikko Jenkins pleaded no contest in 2014 to four counts of first-degree murder for the killings that August.

In January 2015, a jury convicted Erica of first-degree murder in Bradford’s death, along with two weapons counts. She was sentenced to life.

Separately, she was convicted of the two robberies near the park, not of those men’s murders, and sentenced to two back-to-back terms of 30 to 50 years. Nothing in this record ties her to Andrea Kruger’s death.

The Nebraska Supreme Court upheld the murder conviction on August 19, 2016. It was three years to the day after Bradford was found.

Sources for this section: 1, 2, 5, 6, 7

The cousin in the cell

Christine Bordeaux, the cousin, had been Erica’s codefendant in earlier felony proceedings. She testified against Erica in exchange for a reduced sentence.

About two weeks before September 24, 2016, inside the Nebraska Correctional Center for Women in York, Erica asked Bordeaux to sign an affidavit and other documents taking that testimony back. Bordeaux understood they were meant to help Erica get a new trial. She kept putting her off. She never signed.

A few days before the 24th, prison officials moved Erica into the cell Bordeaux shared with two other women. Whether Erica asked for that move is disputed. One employee remembered her wanting it. Defense witnesses said she opposed it.

That afternoon, Bordeaux came back from the shower and sat at the sink to brush her hair. Cameras in the common area showed Erica following her in.

Bordeaux testified that Erica pulled her to the floor from behind and beat her, and then hit her again and again with a padlock. Another inmate, Priscilla Fields, joined in and kicked her. Fields, who testified under a plea deal, first told investigators it was a mutual fight. At trial, she said she saw Erica hitting Bordeaux with the padlock.

Afterward, by Bordeaux’s account, Erica told her she was sorry, and that now Bordeaux was going to sign the papers.

Bordeaux left that cell in a wheelchair, with a broken nose, a broken finger and a concussion.

Sources for this section: 3, 8

Three judges

On May 30, 2017, a three-judge panel sentenced Nikko Jenkins to death.

Sources for this section: 7

York

A jury convicted Erica of assaulting Bordeaux, though it acquitted her of a separate weapons count. She received another 20 to 40 years. An appeals court upheld it in 2020.

In December 2024, KOLN reported that a York jury had convicted her of another assault at the same prison, under a new legal name. That report hasn’t been checked against the court file, and no report of the sentence was found for this story.

Sources for this section: 3, 8, 9

What’s left

Why a cooperating witness ended up in the same cell as the woman she had testified against is a question the record doesn’t answer.