Orlando Ramirez listens during his trial Tuesday.
Matt Hamilton/The Daily CitizenDALTON, Ga. From the stand, he awaited the tough questions, the 21-year-old defendant with a seventh-grade education, the one wearing too-big dress slacks, the one facing life in prison.
Bert Poston, district attorney for the Conasauga Judicial Circuit, stood up and approached the defendant. For 30 minutes, Poston had listened to Orlando Ramirez provide the jury with his account of the night of March 23, the night he shot one security guard dead and wounded another.
Ramirez told the jury how he felt threatened. How a rival gang controlled Las Delicias Bar at 511 E. Morris St. How some people brutally beat his brother at the bar weeks earlier. How he didn’t even want to be there — it was his friend’s idea.
Ramirez testified that he tried to walk through the bar’s open door that night when Daniel Maldonado-Flores grabbed him tightly, yelled at him, cursed at him. Ramirez said Maldonado-Flores never identified himself as a security guard and outweighed him by 80 pounds. Ramirez said he was scared.
He said the security guard charged at him, and that’s when he shot him twice. He said another mysterious man — Bruno Rodriguez — charged at him next, so he shot him twice as well, killing Rodriguez.