Twice-guilty burglar claims innocence

A repeat felon heard closing arguments yesterday, March 9, during the re-trial of his most recent alleged burglary in which he is accused of stealing items from a Carlsbad home in August of 2013.

During the previous trial of this case last September, Kenny Allen Lowary, 40, acted as his own attorney. After a little more than one day of deliberations, that jury declared they were deadlocked.

During his trial last week, in which he was represented by a public defender, Lowary took the witness box for about an hour.

The defendant claimed that he went to the home in the 4000 block of Crescent Drive because he had an agreement with the owner to paint her house. The homeowner, now 81, took the witness box and said she had never seen the man before; defense attorney Lindsay Fradin Itzhaki suggested that the homeowner's memory is faulty.

Prosecutor Landy Spencer-Daly reminded the jury that multiple law-enforcement witnesses swore that they saw the defendant inside the home before he jumped from a second-story window during an escape attempt. The defendant denies that he ever went inside the home.

Responding to an officer’s testimony that he clearly saw the defendant inside the home, Lowary suggested that officer Anthony Jucenas must have seen his own reflection in the window glass.

Other witnesses testified that Lowary had been seen earlier that afternoon around the neighborhood, knocking on back doors and surprising different homeowners and causing suspicion. When he came face-to-face with homeowners, Lowary represented himself as a landscape worker. “He’s casing the neighborhood in his thought-out costume,” the prosecutor asserted. Witnesses reported Lowary wearing a bright reflective vest, the kind often seen on utility workers.

The defense attorney stated that Lowary was going around the neighborhood “to hustle business to support his family.” Finding work was hard because Lowary is a convicted felon, Fradin Itzhaki explained.

Spencer-Daly claims that Lowary has multiple prior felony convictions in San Diego County since 1998, including two prior burglary convictions.

“They caught him red-handed,” the prosecutor declared. Police said that after they tackled Lowary in the front yard of the home, they found one stolen item on him. And when he was taken into custody, Lowary was wearing a colorful Jazzercise T-shirt, which he is accused of taking from inside the home; however, the defendant asserted that it was his Jazzercise shirt, which he chose to wear that day because he said he learned in his conversation with the homeowner that she had worked for the Jazzercise company for 20 years.

Lowary was taken to the hospital after a police dog bit him during the struggle in front of the home. Itzhaki said the dog latched onto Lowary’s chest and “It bites his nipple off.”

The prosecution claimed that hospital personnel found three more items of stolen jewelry in the hospital room where Lowary was treated. The defense seemed to suggest that officers planted all the items of evidence that were allegedly taken from the home. But the prosecutor asserted: “This is not a world of pretend or conspiracy theories.”

Defendant Lowary, who wore his hair in a tidy ponytail on his neck, was born in National City and most recently resided in Vista. He is in custody at San Diego's downtown jail.

The jury of six men and six women went into deliberations mid-day in San Diego’s North County Superior Court.