As the trial was approaching, we received the list of witnesses that the prosecutors intended to call during the trial. These consisted mostly of the witnesses they had during the grand jury proceedings. However there was one glaring omission. We will call this witness K.T. to protect his identity.
K.T., as it turned out, was part of the mob that led the initial attack. However, he didn’t quite realize what he was getting into, and soon regretted his actions and came out against the actions of the rest of the mob.
He came forward as a witness and reluctantly met with police several days after the incident. His statements weren’t recorded, but the police officer he met with wrote up a summary report. In this summary report, K.T. speaks about how a “mob mentality was brewing” around me, that there were “aggressors” who were “advancing on him [me] in a tough guy manner”, and that a “big man” pushed me and “then gave Strickland a pretty forceful whip and tossed him.”
K.T. went on to say that I “still could have been rushed” even after I had drawn, reholstered, and continued to create distance between myself and the aforementioned aggressors.
Since K.T. was not on the state’s witness list, it was up to us to call him as a witness. Chris Trotter said it was unfortunate that K.T. was not already on the state’s list, but made no efforts to push the state to add him.
Short and Trotter’s private investigator, Jason Servo, could not locate K.T. So I received a call Saturday morning from Trotter, 2 days before the trial is set to begin, asking me if I could find K.T. and if I could call around to some of my activist contacts to try to locate him.
That’s right, Jason Short and Chris Trotter waited until two days before the trial before realizing they should maybe call this key witness during the trial, and now it was my problem to try to find him.
The only info I could get was a possible place of employment for K.T., but I could not locate him.
Monday morning, right before the trial starts, K.T. walked into the courtroom, having heard that I was trying to locate him. I directed him to my attorneys, figuring he could get subpoenaed and would end up testifying during the trial.
You’re not going to believe how this turned out.