Today (August 8) was the fourth day of the trial of Jason Stockley, a white former St. Louis police officer accused of murder. On December 20th, 2011, Stockley killed Anthony Lamar Smith, a black St. Louis resident. He believed he saw Smith engaged in a “hand to hand drug transaction” in a Church’s Chicken parking lot. When Smith saw Stockley and his partner, Brian Bianchi, enter the parking lot in their patrol vehicle, he got in his car and left the parking lot, hitting Stockley and Bianchi’s police cruiser in the process.
Stockley shot at the vehicle as Smith fled. Then he and Bianchi gave chase for three miles, and eventually rammed Smith’s car. Stockley and Bianchi walked up to the car. Then, within under a minute, Stockley shot Smith several times.
Over the course of last week, witnesses for the prosecution took the stand – DNA analysts, police officers, FBI experts, witnesses, and others. The prosecution presented video evidence, from both the dashboard camera of the police car and a bystander’s cell phone.
Today, the defense presented their witnesses. As opposed to the eighteen witnesses for the prosecution last week, the defense had only two: Montasser Jodah, a salesman who witnessed the shooting and aftermath from the doors of Dynasty Discounts, and Jason Stockley himself.
Jodah’s testimony took up the first hour of the trial, and corroborated what many of the witnesses for the prosecution said: there was a car crash, then a shooting, then police officers and civilians gathered in the aftermath. Jodah, however, couldn’t see much of the scene, because the car itself was in his way. “I do not know what’s going on, I couldn’t see what’s going on” he said.
Stockley’s testimony, by contrast, took up the better part of four hours. The defense had him detail his history: he was a West Point graduate and served in Iraq for four years, and almost immediately after his medical discharge, entered the St. Louis Police Academy.
The defense had him watch the dashcam and cellphone videos of his own actions on the stand, videos which, by his own admission, he’d seen “well over a hundred times.”
He went through the videos, describing his own actions as “self-defense”. Whenever the defense attorney asked him what he was feeling at a given moment in the videos of the pursuit and the shooting, he said “fear.” His fear of those he was policing is also what made him buy the AK-47 he was carrying at the time of the shooting (though he used his department-issued Berretta pistol to shoot Smith.)
When asked why he had an AK-47 – which he knew he wasn’t supposed to carry on duty – he said, “I had made the decision several months prior to this. There had been several homicides that I’d been on the scene of that had 7.62 millimeter casings on the ground.” Those are military-grade bullet casings.
“The ABB incident was on my mind as well,” he said, referencing a violent workplace shooting by an employee at the ABB power plant in 2010.
Stockley said he knew there was a special order against personal weapons at work, but he ignored it because he wanted the “determent effect” of the semiautomatic weapon.
“I valued the lives of me and other officers more than the policy,” Stockley said.
He claimed his aggressive behavior at the scene was because he believed Smith–who he referred to only as “the suspect”–had a small, silver revolver. No explanation was offered for why Stockley’s DNA was the only DNA on the gun eventually recovered from the car.
In his opinion, after he first saw the gun, he was already justified to use deadly force.
The atmosphere in the courtroom grew tenser as the day wore on. The courtroom was locked down as Stockley testified. Observers were not permitted to leave, use the bathroom, and come back in, as they had been while previous witnesses testified.
A man was permanently banned from the courtroom, and escorted out during the trial, for wearing a t-shirt with Smith’s name on it.
Outside the courthouse, a group of protesters gathered demanding that Stockley be convicted. One sign said, “JASON STOCKLEY IS A MURDERER.”
Partway through the morning, talk turned to the audio on the dashcam recording of the pursuit. Stockley can be heard on that audio saying “we’re gonna kill that [expletive],” about 45 seconds before he shot Smith 5 times. Stockley admitted to saying that, as well as telling Bianchi to “get him,” because he recognized his own voice on the audio.
“I never denied it was my voice,” he said, “but I have no recollection of saying that.” He wasn’t able to provide an explanation for telling Bianchi that “we’re gonna kill that [expletive],” because, he said, he didn’t remember the context in which he said it.
After Bianchi and Stockley’s police Tahoe collided with Smith’s car, Stockley said he got out and went to Smith’s drivers’ side window. He was still carrying his AK-47, then switched weapons. Eventually, he said, he became convinced that Smith had a gun, because “the right hand kept moving,” and Smith had a “change in facial expression.”
Smith never said anything throughout the whole encounter. “I don’t even know what his voice sounds like,” said Stockley. “I never heard a word.”
But, Stockley said, Smith’s facial expressions and hand movements were enough to startle him. He shot Smith 5 times in the left side of his body.
“Once I started shooting, I was afraid that he was going to shoot me,” Stockley said.
Afterwards, as previously discussed in the trial, Stockley returned to his own car four times. First, he returned his AK-47 to the car. Then, he said, he tried to get some QuikClot wound dressing from his car (a first aid product intended to aid in blood clotting for massive external bleeding.) But when he went back to the car, he said “it was futile” to actually administer the QuikClot. In fact, by his own admission, he never administered any first aid to Smith at all.
Stockley denied the prosecution’s claims that he’d planted a gun in the car, insisting that “the first time I ever touched that gun was inside the suspect’s vehicle.”
After Stockley’s testimony, and extensive cross-examination, the defense rested. Other possible witnesses, including Brian Bianchi–Stockley’s partner, and one of the few people who might have seen parts of the scene that had not been discussed yet–were not called to the stand.
Closing arguments by both sides will be heard at 9:30 AM tomorrow, August 9th, and the verdict will likely be announced sometime this week.
