Senior Superior Court Judge James Webb repeating his usual warning to jurors in the trial of Kevin Nicholas Brower not to discuss, form any opinions, visit any places referred to, do any investigation on their own or read anything about the case.
Jurors had a lot to think about: deadly bullets, autopsy pictures, testimony by a surviving victim, a signed statement made by the defendant himself.
Vivid color photographs of a bloody living room in a trailer at Sunset Mobile Home Park near Robbins had been passed from hand to hand. They showed the bodies of three Hispanic men: Emedel Rosas Hernandez, 23, of Robbins; Elmer Adan Carbajal, 25, of Candor; and Jose Luis Zapatero, 38, of Robbins as found by Detective. Lt. Richard Talbert.
Talbert told the jury he was the detective on duty June 3, 2002, when a Moore County sheriff’s dispatcher called him at home. There were reports of a trailer park shooting and three possible homicides.
Talbert testified that he sped to the scene, arriving some 30 to 40 minutes later. Responding to a question from defense attorney James R. Van Camp, Talbert said he had no way of knowing how long after shots rang out the first 911 calls had been made.
Van Camp and Bruce Cunning-ham are court-appointed attorneys for Brower, who faces a possible death sentence if convicted on any of three first-degree murder charges. He is also charged with assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill a wounded survivor, Juan Guer-rero Romero, who testified earlier.
Brower made and signed a statement the day following the shooting. It was read to the jury.
Assistant District Attorney Warren McSweeney led Talbert through his supervision of the crime scene investigation. Talbert was later named lead investigator, the man in charge of the case. Throughout the trial, he has been seated next to McSweeney.
Talbert found bullets, bullet fragments, shell casings and other evidence he handed to another officer to be bagged and marked, a third detective taking notes. He collected blood samples and sent them to the SBI crime lab in Raleigh for analysis.
McSweeney set up a large map of the scene with outline drawings of three bodies.
Talbert identified Hernandez lying across the middle of the room, feet toward a kitchen table on one wall and his head on a cushion near a flowered two seat sofa opposite, by the front door.
He pointed to the outline of Zapatero lying to the right at an angle by a bedroom door near the corner of a blue sofa and a red toolbox. He identified a third body as Carbajal, lying on his side, his head near one leg of the kitchen table, between the table and the blue sofa.
No fingerprints had been taken at the scene, Talbert told Van Camp on cross examination. The table was covered with a white crocheted cloth, a poor surface for prints, as bad as couch fabric, he said.
As red-edged plastic evidence bags containing things collected at the scene were passed to jurors, Webb invited any who wanted to leave their seats and compare ID marks on the bags to locations marked on the map to feel free to do so.
“I must caution you, you are to examine these exhibits without comment,” Webb said. None rose.
While this map appears closely to represent the crowded setting in the small trailer — described by Talbert as no more than 12 feet wide — it is marked “not to scale.”
Investigators first made a plan for examining the scene of the crime, Talbert said. They would work around the rooms in one direction, taking each thing they saw in turn, one room at a time. It took three hours.
First, they had an officer photograph things as they were. Then they started looking.
“We worked a pattern around the rooms,” Talbert said. “We searched the kitchen, searched the whole house, room by room. We looked for drugs, firearms, bullets. We didn’t find any.”
Outside the trailer, some 10 to 12 other people were standing behind yellow crime-scene tape. None were interviewed as far as he knew, Talbert testified. He was in the trailer the whole time. He did not know until later that another detective, Gerald Sea-well, had some months before helped federal agents search the Hernandez mobile home next door seizing weapons, drugs, and lab scales of the type drug dealers use.
No gunshot residue tests were made to see whether any of the victims had recently fired a gun, Talbert told Van Camp on cross examination. Hands were not bagged to protect against contamination in case medical examiners would conduct such tests.
Nobody interviewed two cous-ins Romero previously testified were outside the trailer at the time of the shooting, and who rushed inside to lift him up and stem his bleeding with a shirt.
“Did you go see them?” Van Camp asked. “Ever find them? Look for them?”
Talbert said he did not. Nobody knows where they are. Other detectives did search vehicles in the area, Talbert said.
Jurors examined everything introduced. When Talbert’s testimony was done, and time for the holiday recess approached, Webb checked his list and made sure everything had been passed around the jury box.
There are 12 jurors and three alternates, 15 in all. They handed around plastic bags, pictures, paper bags containing bloody shirts and other items.
At the request of one juror, a bailiff put on purple protective gloves and one at a time held up two T-shirts. One was once yellow, the other pale gray. Both are now nearly covered in the chocolate brown of soaked and dried blood.
Brower’s statement, in 15 copies, was handed out. The jurors read it carefully, page by page. Some looked back to read again the section at the end of one page and top of another where Brower describes hearing a gunshot behind him and turning to find himself in what he calls a do or die situation, pulls his own .45, and starts shooting, everything happening fast, later not remembering just who shot who.
With all evidence collected for safekeeping and jurors released, Webb recessed the trial until Monday. Brower was taken back to jail.
John Chappell can be reached at 783-5841 or by e-mail at jchappell@thepilot.com.
