When Terrence Paul Jenkins ripped open a teenage girl’s car door outside a Riverton movie theater in an attempt to kidnap her, she first thought it was someone playing a joke on her.
Then the girl, Cedar Smith, said she felt Jenkins’ knife pressed against her throat, and felt him pulling her hair.
It was May 28, 2022. Smith had just finished her sophomore year of high school and was preparing to drive home after a movie-theater date with her boyfriend.
Several things surged through Smith at once, including a memory of an uncle asking her earlier that week to make a plan for what she’d do if a man attacked her; the thought of other Native American girls who didn’t survive dangerous situations; and adrenaline.
“I just promised myself I wasn’t going to go with him or let him do anything to me,” Smith told Cowboy State Daily on Thursday. “I promised myself I wasn’t going to be just another Native girl (memorialized) in a post on Facebook saying, ‘Oh, she didn’t make it out.’”
Smith fought with all her might as Jenkins tried to force her into the passenger seat of her own car.
She testified at Jenkins’ sentencing hearing Thursday in Fremont County District Court that he groped her, yanked at her hair, choked her until she couldn’t breathe, punched her and tried to pull her pants down.
“That will always be burned into my memory and I hate it,” Smith told the court. “The bruises and cuts from what happened still feel like they’re there.”
She resents that the trauma is still with her, she said, adding that, “it has made me so much stronger.”
Ultimately that evening, Smith fought Jenkins off. She slid out of her shirt and fled into the movie theater, where another young woman let her borrow a jacket as she called her aunt.
Jenkins stole Smith’s car and her phone. Smith’s phone contained a tracking application that her guardian and “Auntie,” Courtney Smith, used to keep tabs on the girl’s safety at the time.
Courtney Smith noticed her niece’s car was moving in the wrong direction and knew something was wrong.
Moments later, Cedar Smith called from the movie theater to say she’d been robbed.
Courtney and her husband arrived to find Cedar covered in blood from head to waist. They later found her car singed, as if someone had set fire to it.
“I’m so proud of her strength,” Courtney Smith wrote in a Facebook post at that time. “She didn’t let him win. She was smart and used what she had. I couldn’t be any prouder of her.”
Forty Years
Fremont County District Court Judge Jason Conder sentenced Jenkins to between 36 and 40 years in prison after a Thursday sentencing hearing for Jenkins’ attack on Smith — and his attack on another woman who was just visiting Riverton, whom Jenkins stabbed and robbed that same evening at a liquor store.
He’d only been out of prison a short while for earlier crimes when he decided to unleash that crime spree, Fremont County Attorney Patrick LeBrun told the court.
The stabbing victim was life-flighted to Billings, Montana, for care.
Jenkins pleaded guilty to five assorted counts of aggravated assault, aggravated burglary and arson in December, and established a plea agreement in which LeBrun agreed not to argue for more than 40 years in prison.
The only reason Conder accepted that plea agreement was because Jenkins took responsibility for what he’d done, the judge said Thursday.
Conder ordered Jenkins to pay $5,410.87 to the state’s victim compensation fund for costs the victims incurred from his actions. That includes $5,280.87 to compensate the woman he stabbed at the liquor store, and $130 to compensate Cedar Smith’s costs.
This case is being adjudicated nearly three years after the crime because federal authorities prosecuted Jenkins for another crime before Wyoming authorities took custody of him.
Never Too Late
Jenkins apologized to his victims in court.
“I know I can’t take back what I did, but if I could, I would,” he said.
Courtney Smith reached for and held her niece’s hand as he spoke.
“I know I’m supposed to be a protector, especially to my own people,” said Jenkins. “I apologize.”
Courtney and Cedar Smith told Cowboy State Daily after the hearing that they want to convey to Jenkins that they forgive him.
“We pray and hope that he heals in all the right ways he needs to,” said Courtney, adding that the family thanks him for taking accountability.
Cedar voiced her decision to forgive her attacker as well, and said she hopes he’ll learn to protect women and show human decency.
“There’s no time limit on when you can be a good person and to change your life,” added Courtney Smith. “It’s never too late.”
Conder had recommended for Jenkins to receive addiction treatment in prison.
So Thankful
Courtney Smith told Cowboy State Daily that in her view, the immediate response of the Riverton Police Department that night was unimpressive, and that she’s glad she and her husband both have experience with law enforcement processes, him as a former law enforcement agent and her as a victim advocate.
But it felt unfortunate to her, to have to use her professional skills to help her niece when she would rather have been comforting her, she said.
RPD did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
