On the second day of the trial, the state’s star witness and chief “victim,” Ben Kerensa, was called to the stand. This was the 400 pound guy who had organized and led the mob to attack me, and was the one yelling at me to “GET THE F*** OUT OF HERE!” while shoving me after sneaking up behind me.
His testimony would be the most important of any witness.
So instead of the more experienced and more confident Jason Short questioning Kerensa, for some reason he deferred to his junior assistant Chris Trotter to handle the most important questions of the trial. Remember, they had told me the week before that Short would be the one doing the questioning.
During the direct examination by DA Kate Molina and during the cross exam by Trotter, several inconsistencies arose in Kerensa’s testimony that differed from the video evidence.
For some reason Trotter became obsessed with Kerensa testifying that as he was making his way toward me, some woman grabbed his arm and said “What are you doing?” which Kerensa claims was what drew my attention to him and his violent gang, but was not heard on my video. Trotter kept going down this rabbit hole, for some reason.
What Trotter seemed to ignore was perhaps the most key part of the testimony. Kerensa claimed that he saw me reaching for a gun right away, and that’s why he had to get physical with me, to grab and throw me out of the crowd for safety of everyone else.
That is patently untrue, as I didn’t reach for the gun until 12 seconds after that, as I was backing away in retreat and Kerensa and his gang of thugs started to chase after me.
By Kerensa testifying in the way that he did, he made it sound to the court as if he was the one then acting in self defense of himself and the rest of the crowd.
Inexplicably, as Kerensa was describing this, Trotter kept nodding his head going “okay, okay,” as if to agree with him. To make matters more infuriating, we knew Kerensa would say these things, because in the initial police report from the incident, what little information there was about Kerensa’s statements included a part where he told a police officer that same thing, even though it was untrue.
Kerensa also testified that I had pulled my gun out a total of 4 or 5 times throughout the incident. This is untrue, I only pulled it out and drew it once, because that was the moment where I was in the most danger. That level of danger did not arise before or after those critical moments.
Kerensa also testified that he didn’t speak with police, yet he’s seen on video talking with police just minutes after it all happened. For some inexplicable reason, Jason Short decided to not show that part of the video in court, missing yet another opportunity to demonstrate Kerensa’s dishonesty.
Remember in a previous post how I mentioned a witness by the initials of K.T.? Well, since he was a direct witness to the initial attack, he could have rebutted everything Kerensa was saying.
To my total disbelief, Jason Short didn’t think it was of any value to call K.T. to the witness stand to rebut those things and they never called him as a witness.
Chris Trotter and Jason Short made no effort to counter Kerensa’s claims that I had immediately reached for the gun.
Jason Short, the worst attorney in Oregon, willingly allowed a violent thug who started a physical altercation with his client to repeatedly lie about the incident in court, and rather than challenge each individual thing Kerensa was lying about, Short went along with it as if it were true and didn’t call a witness who could have provided information to help his client.
Is this the type of attorney you want representing you or a loved one?