Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Jury hears opening statements in barracks ambush trial
Chester County residents are jurors in alleged cop killer Eric Frein’s trial
MILFORD >> A jury made up of residents of Chester County began hearing the case of the man accused of ambushing two state troopers outside their barracks in Pike County. The panel of seven men and five women, as well as six alternate jurors, are being sequestered in the county seat of
Milford during the six to eight weeks the trial is expected to last.
The panel was chosen from the county after the Common Pleas Court judge overseeing the case determined that pre-trial publicity had made it impossible to impanel a jury from that county, located along the state’s northeastern boundary with New Jersey. The manhunt for defendant Eric Frein had made national headlines.
A prosecutor asked jurors Tuesday to deliver “full justice” in the trial of Frien, who is accused of killing a police trooper and injuring a second in a 2014 sniper attack at their barracks, calling the defendant an assassin who targeted law enforcement in hopes of sparking a revolution.
Frein “slithered through the underbrush” in the dark of night, concealed himself in woods across the street from the Blooming Grove barracks in northeastern Pennsylvania, and took aim at Cpl. Bryon Dickson II and Trooper Alex Douglass during a late-night shift change, Pike County First Assistant District Attorney Bruce DeSarro told the panel during his opening statement.
“Right then and right there, Cpl. Dickson’s service and his watch on behalf of all of us came to an end,” DeSarro said.
Douglass, he added, has endured 18 surgeries in the wake of the ambush on Sept. 12, 2014. Douglass was in the courtroom Tuesday and is expected to testify.
Frein, 33, faces a potential death sentence if he’s convicted.
Wearing a suit, he listened stoically as the prosecutor methodically laid out the case against him, describing the attack, the chaotic aftermath, Frein’s escape and the 48-day manhunt that followed.
DeSarro told the jury that U.S. marshals captured one of the FBI’s most-wanted fugitives at an abandoned airplane hangar where authorities also found the murder weapon — a semi-automatic rifle — with Frein’s DNA on it.
After speaking for an hour and 40 minutes, DeSarro asked the jury to provide “nothing less, and I mean nothing less, than full justice.” The words were spelled out in giant blue letters on a TV screen as DeSarro said them.
Frein’s attorney’s opening statement, meanwhile, took only six minutes.
Defense lawyer Michael Weinstein reminded jurors that Frein is presumed innocent and said the government must prove its case. Frein won’t take the stand, he said, but jurors will get to know him when they watch a videotaped interview that police conducted on the night of his arrest.
“It will give you a chance to meet Eric. It will give you a chance to see what he’s like,” Weinstein said.
The defense had tried to suppress Frein’s confession, asserting police had violated his right to remain silent, but a judge ruled the jury would be permitted to see it.
DeSarro showed jurors the crumpled notebook pages that police found during the manhunt — part of a journal written in Frein’s hand in which the gunman describes how he “got a shot around 11 p.m. and took it,” watching one of his victims fall “still and quiet.”
DeSarro also showed them portions of a letter that authorities say Frein wrote to his parents while on the run.
“Our nation is far from what it was and what it should be,” the letter said. “There is so much wrong and on so many levels only passing through the crucible of another revolution can get us back the liberties we once had ... Tension is high at the moment and the time seems right for a spark to ignite a fire in the hearts of men.”