Los Angeles - — A jury could be weighing the fate of Johannes Mehserle by Thursday afternoon, after a prosecutor at the former BART police officer's murder trial used his final witnesses to attack Mehserle's assertion that he accidentally drew his pistol and killed Oscar Grant.
Both the prosecution and defense rested their cases Tuesday, setting up closing arguments on Thursday morning in the controversial case. Today, jurors are off while Judge Robert Perry rules on whether they will be able to consider manslaughter charges as alternatives to murder - options the defense opposes.
On the witness stand last week, Mehserle said he meant to shock the unarmed Grant with a Taser while arresting him at Oakland's Fruitvale Station after a fight on a train early Jan. 1, 2009. Witnesses have said Mehserle appeared shocked after pulling the trigger.
But prosecutor David Stein, in his rebuttal case Tuesday, showed jurors that Mehserle's black Sig Sauer P226 pistol weighed roughly 2 1/2 pounds, more than three times as much as his yellow Taser X26.
An investigator working for Stein said on the witness stand that he had disarmed the officer's weapons without changing their weights, a move that will allow jurors to touch them - and perhaps draw them from the holsters on Mehserle's utility belt - in the deliberation room.
Stein also called to the witness stand Terry Foreman, one of Mehserle's closest friends on the BART force. Foreman said he had sat with Mehserle at police headquarters in the hours after the shooting, had driven him home that morning, and had spoken to him several times in subsequent days.
Mehserle never said he had mistaken his firearm for his Taser, Foreman testified, but only repeated that he thought Grant had been reaching for a gun. Foreman recalled that as he drove Mehserle back from his then-attorney's office in Sacramento one day, his friend grew emotional.
"All of a sudden, he just broke down and said, 'I thought he had a gun, I thought he had a gun,' " Foreman said.
Under cross-examination by defense attorney Michael Rains, Foreman and three other BART officers who interacted with Mehserle after the shooting said they had never given Mehserle an opportunity to explain how or why he shot Grant. They said cops are trained to consult only with an attorney after an officer-involved shooting.
"I shut him down," Foreman said, referring to one of his first conversations with Mehserle. "When he started talking about it, I said, 'I'm not here for that.' "
Foreman described Mehserle as even-tempered, hard-working and popular within the BART ranks. But after the shooting, Foreman said, his friend was so distraught that he urged his superiors to quickly arrange mental health counseling.
Earlier Tuesday, Rains rested his defense case after calling his final witnesses, including an expert on how police officers perform in high-stress situations.
William Lewinski, a recently retired professor at Minnesota State University Mankato, lent support to the defense's argument that Mehserle could have turned to a skill that was well-developed and automatic - the drawing of his gun - rather than to the Taser he had been issued less than a month before.
Lewinski also said officers tend to get "tunnel vision," focusing narrowly on threats.
Video footage of the shooting shows that as Mehserle raised the gun, a second BART officer, Anthony Pirone, had his left knee on Grant's neck. Pirone's left hand was pressing Grant's head into the platform, and Pirone's right hand was holding Grant's right arm - the same one Mehserle said he couldn't secure, thus prompting him to turn to his Taser.
Later in the morning session, Grant's mother, Wanda Johnson, broke into tears during the testimony of Dr. Thomas Rogers as he described the autopsy he conducted on Grant for the Alameda County coroner. During the lunch break, Johnson had to be taken to a hospital in an ambulance after she became disoriented outside the courthouse.
Cephus "Bobby" Johnson, her brother, said she was suffering from stress and exhaustion. He said she was released later in the day and hopes to attend the rest of the trial.
