MISSOULA, Mont. (AP) – The girlfriend of a Montana man accused of killing a German exchange student in his garage testified that she kept a baseball bat with her while he kept a shotgun nearby after their home had been burglarized twice in the days before the fatal shooting.
Janelle Pflager said that she purchased a baseball bat for safety and set up multiple motion detectors fearing the burglars would return. She said Markus Kaarma brought a shotgun upstairs from the basement, loaded it and kept it in the dining room.
“I walked around with a baseball bat for a while because I didn’t know when they were coming or who they were,” she said of the burglars.
She said she planned to use it to hold intruders at bay and said she thought that was Kaarma’s thinking about the gun.
“I think the way he looked at it was same way I looked at the baseball bat,” she said.” I have this bat; you’re going to listen to what I say… I thought it was a scare thing.”
Kaarma is charged with baiting the shooting victim, Diren Dede, into sneaking into his Missoula garage early April 27, and killing him with four shotgun blasts after being alerted by a motion detector. He has pleaded innocent to deliberate homicide, citing fear of harm to his family and property after the previous burglaries.
Pflager’s testimony came as prosecutors opened their case Thursday.
Deputy County Attorney Jennifer Clark said Kaarma gave no warning before firing in the darkened garage four times after tripping the motion sensor, and that Kaarma paused between the third and fourth shots.
“Neighbors heard the sequence of shots,” Clark said. “They heard boom, boom, boom, pause, boom.” She held the pump-action shotgun used in the slaying and simulated firing it.
Days before the shooting, Kaarma had gone for a haircut at a Great Clips and three women from the shop testified Thursday that they heard Kaarma say he had been waiting up nights to shoot an intruder.
“I’ve been up three nights with a shotgun waiting to kill some kids,” hair stylist Tanya Colby said when asked what Kaarma talked about during the hair cut. She said he later told her, “I’m not kidding, you’re seriously going to see this on the news.”
Colby also said Kaarma believed police weren’t doing anything about the burglaries.
Defense attorney Paul Ryan said Montana law allows homeowners to protect their residences with deadly force when they believe they are going to be harmed.
Kaarma didn’t know whether the person inside the garage was armed, Ryan said. He said Kaarma felt targeted and increasingly anxious for the safety Pflager and their infant son after the first burglaries.
Montana’s “stand your ground” law makes it easier for people to avoid prosecution in a shooting if they felt an imminent danger, whether or not the person shot was armed. Dede, from the German city of Hamburg, was not carrying a weapon.
Dede’s parents, Celal and Gulcin Dede, are attending the trial.
“We have lost a bit of our joy for life,” Celal Dede said in a prepared statement to Germany’s RTL Television. “We can no longer laugh, no longer be happy. A huge part of us was taken from our lives – a part that made our family very happy.”