Woman pleads to role that led to fatal shooting

3/9/2007

BOWLING GREEN - A Southfield, Mich., woman pleaded guilty yesterday to complicity to robbery for her role in an incident at the Bowling Green License Bureau last year that led to the fatal shooting of a Detroit-area man.

Barbara Jean Clark, 28, entered the plea to the reduced charge in Wood County Common Pleas Court as part of an agreement with prosecutors. She had been indicted for complicity to aggravated robbery, a first-degree felony, but pleaded guilty to a third-degree felony.

Clark faces up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine when she is sentenced May 7 by Judge Reeve Kelsey.

Investigators said Clark waited outside the license bureau on East Wooster Street March 25 when Donti Jamal Henry went inside and presented fake documents in an attempt to get a state identification card.

Employees called police. When an officer arrived, he and Henry got into a scuffle, and Henry pulled out a handgun and fired once.

No one was hurt, but Henry fled in a van with Clark. He let her out of the vehicle near the Wooster Street entrance to southbound I-75 and police arrested her after finding her walking along the interstate. Henry led officers on a 40-mile chase to Bluffton, Ohio, where he was shot dead after exchanging gunfire with state troopers and a Wood County sheriff's deputy.

A Hancock County grand jury subsequently cleared the law enforcement officers of any wrongdoing in the shooting, saying they "properly acted in self-defense."