State jurors in the Christopher Deedy murder retrial got their first look Friday at the McDonald’s restaurant video of the events that culminated in the fatal shooting of Kollin Elderts.
Prosecutors played the surveillance video during the testimony of former Kuhio Avenue McDonald’s worker Brandalynn Salzbrenner. She was on duty when Deedy, 30, a U.S. State Department special agent, fatally shot 23-year-old Elderts in the Waikiki restaurant Nov. 5, 2011.
Deedy claims he shot Elderts in self-defense after Elderts attacked him. He had arrived in Honolulu just 12 hours earlier to provide security for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting. His first trial last year ended with a hung jury.
The action in the freeze-frame video appears choppy because it displays a series of still images that cameras in the restaurant captured about once every second. The video also has no accompanying sound.
Prosecutors first showed an uninterrupted segment of video recorded by the camera behind the cash registers, from the time Deedy’s college buddy Adam Gutowski walked up to the counter, followed by Deedy and Gutowski’s girlfriend Jessica West, to after the shooting when Deedy enters the frame from out of view with his shirt covered in blood. The video captured by the register camera does not show the shooting.
They then played the video again, stopping on different frames, to ask Salzbrenner to explain for the jurors what was happening. Prosecutors also showed selected reverse-angle images of the events recorded by the surveillance camera in the front of the restaurant’s main dining area.
Salzbrenner described Gutowski’s behavior in the restaurant as that of a "happy drunk," joking around with other customers and restaurant workers and even proposing marriage to a fellow cashier.
"I could tell that he was drinking, that he had some drinks," Salzbrenner said.
She said Deedy and West also appeared happy and seemed to have had some drinks as well.
Elderts and his friend Shane Medeiros arrived at the restaurant after Deedy.
Salzbrenner said Elderts and Medeiros also seemed happy and joked around with her and her fellow workers. She said they too appeared to have been drinking.
"’Cause we were standing so close to them so you could smell the alcohol off of them," Salzbrenner said.
She said after she believed Gutowski and West left the restaurant, Deedy stayed and started talking and then arguing with Elderts. Salzbrenner said the restaurant’s security guard ordered the two men to stop. When they didn’t, she said, a customer stepped between the two and appeared to have eased the tension between Elderts and Deedy.
The video, however, shows after the other customer went back to the counter, Deedy remained next to Elderts’ table and was later joined by Gutowski, West, Medeiros and other people who were in the restaurant.
Salzbrenner’s testimony ended for the day before prosecutors got to the part of the video that shows the start of physical violence.
Deedy’s lawyer Thomas Otake repeatedly objected to Salzbrenner testifying about events that were happening when the video shows she had had her back to the action. He also complained to prosecutors after the hearing that they avoided stopping the video on frames that he says clearly show Deedy displaying his law enforcement badge.
