Judge unloads on ‘psychopathic, career criminal’ after kidnapping, assault convictions
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- Retired officer Mike Ouzts testified he was kidnapped, shot, bound and tortured.
- Prosecutors say D’Elena led the attack while Menefee staged a fake lineman breakdown.
- Ouzts said suspects stole cash and safe documents; Gulfport police rescued him.
A Harrison County jury Thursday convicted a Saucier man of kidnapping and aggravated assault of a retired Warren County deputy taken from his home and left to die in an old storage container in Gulfport.
The jury deliberated for several hours before convicting Logan D’Elena, 30, on the charges.
Judge Christopher Schmidt came down hard on the career criminal before sentencing him to two consecutive sentences of life without parole to run consecutive to another sentence of life without parole that D’Elena is already serving for other crimes.
“Judges should be guided in their judicial comments to focus not on the individual, but on the person’s conduct, so I should not comment on how the court believes that having presided over two jury trials in which you have been convicted — that you are a dangerous psychopathic, career criminal with a criminal history as long as King Kong’s arm — I should not say those things to you individually.
“Instead, I should consider that your conduct is depraved, cold, calculated and conduct that deserves the maximum punishment allowed.”
Before the verdict came in Thursday evening, retired officer, Mike Ouzts testified about being shot and tortured and left for dead by D’Elena, 30, on Jan. 23, 2023, and his co-defendant Blake Menefee.
Ouzts said he was asleep at his home in Vicksburg the morning of Jan. 23, 2023, when he heard a knock on the door.
It was around 7 a.m., and he didn’t get up at first because he wasn’t expecting anyone at his home in Warren County. About four minutes later, he heard someone knocking on all the windows at his home, got up, threw on a robe and went to the front door.
“There was a young man there asking for some help jumping his vehicle off,” Ouzts said. “He said his battery was dead.”
The young man, since identified as Blake Menefee, was dressed in an orange reflective safety vest and said he needed help jump-starting his truck parked outside his home.
Ouzts said he saw the young man’s truck parked outside his home next to an orange traffic cone, a barricade and a flashing light to make it look like someone’s public works vehicle.
Something about the scene itself made Ouzts a little suspicious, he said, so he quietly snapped a picture of Menefee standing by the truck outside on his way out there with a jump box to help get the truck started.
When he got to the truck, he said he saw the headlights were on, so he told the young man he didn’t think it was the battery but some type of electrical short.
Menefee claimed to be a lineman who had worked through the night and asked if Ouzts could drive him to get breakfast while his truck charged in the retired deputy’s driveway. Ouzts agreed and drove him to Wendy’s, where Ouzts said he ended up paying for the meal.
Ouzts was just one of those who testified at the three-day trial, which included testimony from Menefee, and other co-defendants charged in other offense connected to the crime. Other testimony came from Gulfport police officers, a crime scene investigator, a DNA expert, and others, including D’Elena himself who denied any wrongdoing.
Menefee previously pleaded guilty to the charges along with other co-defendants in the crime that originated at Ouzts’s home in Warren County and ended in the arrests of eight, including D’Elena and Menefee.
Harrison County District Attorney Crosby Parker and Assistant District Attorney Jasmine Magee are prosecuting the case.
Three days after his kidnapping, on Jan. 26, 2023, Gulfport police officers found Ouzts now, 66, shot and bound with duct tape and rope inside an old storage container in a wooded area off Old Highway 49 behind Grace Temple Baptist Church. By then, Ouzts had gone without food or water for days, was severely dehydrated and hallucinating at times.
“I thought I was going to die,” he said.
Throughout the trial, D’Elena’s attorney, John Weber, has questioned the truthfulness of the testimony of Menefee and others who were also charged in the case with various crimes, because of plea deals they had reached with prosecutors.
Shot, bound and helpless
After Ouzts returned to his home with Menefee after picking up the breakfast, Ouzts said he backed his own GMC truck under his carport.
Then, he went to walk into his house, but said the front door slammed into him like it had been kicked ajar.
What he didn’t know then, he said, was that D’Elena — masked, armed with a gun and wearing a black hoodie —was waiting for him.
As soon as he got inside, Ouzts described how D’Elena appeared, yelling “strong-armed robber” and ultimately fired three or four shots, two of the shots shattering his left leg.
Ouzts said he still managed to get on his feet and tried moving toward his office, where he knew he kept a pistol so he could protect himself.
He said he realized his home had already been ransacked, including his office, and the pistol he hoped to reach for wasn’t there for him to grab.
Ouzts tried to fight off his attacker, he said, but he ultimately fell to the floor, where he said D’Elena used duct tape and rope to bind his hands and legs and cover his eyes before he pulled off Ouzts’ belt from around his waist and used it to drag him around.
After that, he said, the suspect filled a Tupperware bowl with water and used it, along with a towel immersed in the water to waterboard him into giving up the combination to his safe and more.
Ouzts said he never gave D’Elena the combination or anything that he asked of him despite what was happening.
Menefee had fled the scene long before the assault started, but Ouzts said D’Elena used his walkie-talkie to tell his co-defendant to get back to the house to help “load the body.”
Bound and shot, Ouzts said the young men used the belt to drag him to his own truck and placed him in the back floorboard.
His attacker took $2,310 in cash from his pocket and told him he was being taken to Texas — though Ouzts said at one point the man said New Orleans.
Ouzts said D’Elena also had shoved three pills in his mouth once he threw him in the back floorboard, but said he didn’t swallow them, but instead used all that was in him to spit them out because he knew they would likely knock him out.
A drive across state lines and an attempt to escape
Over the next several hours, Ouzts was driven across multiple counties, and said he could see a little through the tape over his eyes and noticed at one point that they had stopped at an AutoZone somewhere.
He said he was trying to figure out where they were.
When D’Elena returned to the truck, Ouzts said he bragged about how he had just bought some type of device that would prevent anyone from tracking Ouzts’ vehicle.
Then, he said, there was a second stop, during which he said he managed to use what strength he had in his legs that remained bound to kick open a door on the truck.
He said he knew immediately he had messed up because when he looked, he saw the truck Menefee had driven to Warren County parked right next to them.
D’Elena saw it, Ouzts said, got back in the truck, and threatened to kill him if he did again.
Hours passed, he said, before a final stop, this time in Gulfport, though Ouzts said he had no idea where he was.
It was there, he said, that D’Elena and Menefee used the belt to drag him across the church parking lot and through the woods before placing him in the old storage container. He said the suspects tied his hands to some hooks in the shelving inside, but he later managed to break those ties free.
Over the next two days — while deprived of food, water and medical care — he said he drifted in and out of consciousness and began hallucinating. He said he knew his body was shutting down, but prayed over and over again that God would save him.
Over the course of his captivity, he said D’Elena returned at times, again and again to force him to give up information to get into the safe, though D’Elena and Menefee eventually managed to crack the safe and retrieve some paperwork and about $100,000 in cash.
During his nearly two hours of testimony, Ouzts recalled how he heard trains passing by and even sirens that would give him brief hope before the sounds drifted off in the distance.
Ouzts said he felt he was nearing the end of his life, hallucinating to the point that he believed he was eating things, before he seemed to suddenly come to and heard what he thought was someone in the distance.
It wasn’t long, he said, before two Gulfport police officers called out, asked who he was, cracked open the storage container and saved him.
Since the crime, Ouzts said a lot has changed for him.
Chief among those changes, he said, is that he never leaves his door unlocked, not even for a second to run to the mailbox or otherwise.
What happened to him, he said, changed the sense of security he once had, but didn’t destroy him.
D’Elena testifies
Prosecutors also played a recording of a phone call between D’Elena and his mother during the trial. In the recording, D’Elena tells her to grab a wallet filled with Ouzts’ credit cards, along with the shoes he had worn to the storage container, and burn them in a pile outside. What D’Elena didn’t know was that a Gulfport police officer was standing nearby, recording the entire conversation.
A DNA expert testified that D’Elena’s DNA was found on a cigarette butt recovered inside the storage container where Ouzts had been held, placing him at the scene.
On Thursday, the third day of trial, D’Elena took the stand in his own defense. He denied taking part in the assault or kidnapping and instead blamed it all on his longtime friend and co-defendant, Menefee. D’Elena claimed his grandfather had loaned Menefee the truck used to drive to Vicksburg, and said that when Menefee returned, he showed D’Elena what he believed was at least $150,000 in cash taken during the attack. Menefee, he said, later gifted him the truck that belonged to Ouzts.
As for the DNA evidence linking him to the storage container, D’Elena told jurors it wasn’t surprising his DNA was found there. He said he had been to the storage unit before because he and others used it as a place to stash stolen items—such as catalytic converters—before selling them later.
‘No respect for basic life and human decency’
In closing arguments, prosecutor Parker described D’Elena as a hardened man devoid of basic humanity.
D’Elena is already serving a life sentence for other crimes, and Parker reminded jurors of the gruesome ordeal the retired officer endured — one that nearly cost him his life.
Taking it one step further, Parker told jurors that the worst part of the case wasn’t simply “the fact that those two went up there and broke into a 64-year-old man’s house.”
“It’s deplorable — but do you know what’s really bad? It’s not the fact that they shot him,” he continued. “It’s not the fact that they stole his stuff, duct-taped him, dragged him down here to Gulfport and left him in an abandoned container in the woods.”
What was worse, Parker said, was that D’Elena “has no respect for basic life and human decency.”
“Whether Michael Ouzts lived or died did not matter to this defendant,” Parker said. “He didn’t care. He wanted to get away with it. He was surprised ... when he told his mom that they (police) found him (Ouzts) alive.”
This story was originally published November 20, 2025 at 10:30 AM.
