Emotional victims testify in Flagstaff

FLAGSTAFF — “How did you know you were shot?” the prosecutor asked.

“Do you want me to explain?” the young man answered.

“It’s the most intense pain you’ve ever felt in your life.”

The Steven Jones murder trial is in its third week of testimony in the Coconino County courthouse in Flagstaff. The prosecution was expected to rest its case today.

On Wednesday, two of the shooting victims took the stand.

Nick Prato was at the off-campus party in the

early-morning hours of Oct. 9, 2015, where Jones and his victims first encountered each other. But Prato was not involved in the verbal altercation that led to the shooting of four Northern Arizona University students.

Colin Brough died of gunshot wounds. His friends, Nick Piring, Kyle Zientek and Prato, were wounded. All were 20 years old at the time.

Zientek testified Wednesday afternoon, though he remembered little more than “still pictures” of the shooting and a long recovery from his wounds. But the testimony was compelling nonetheless.

Jones, now 20, is charged with firstdegree murder and aggravated assault. He claims he fired in self-defense.

Prato described watching from across the street as a flashlight beam moved across an NAU parking lot toward Brough and Piring, who were standing at the far end. It would turn out that the light was affixed to the barrel of Jones’ 9mm Glock pistol.

When he heard the shots, Prato ran toward them.

He found Brough lying on his back on the pavement, and he took him in his arms.

“He was on his back. His shirt was covered with blood,” Prato quietly told the jury. “His eyes were wide open. He was looking up at the sky. He didn’t say a word.”

Then Prato said he tried to get a look at the shooter, Jones, who was either kneeling or sitting on the ground some feet away, where he had been knocked down by other bystanders.

“I’d never seen him before in my life,” Prato said. But he saw him reach behind his back. “I took a couple steps forward,” he said. “I saw the gun pulled on me. That’s all I remember.”

Prato was shot in the neck. He clamped his hand over the wound and ran back to the apartment complex to wait for an ambulance. Brough died of his wounds. It was not the only vivid testimony of the morning.

NAU student Nick Pletke testified that he heard yelling near the Mountain View dormitory that abuts the parking lot, and saw his friends Brough and Piring on the sidewalk in front of a dorm.

He heard an argument but said he didn’t see anyone punching or pushing.

Then he saw the flashlight shine on Brough.

Pletke said he began walking toward Brough at a fast pace when he heard “boom, boom,” which sounded like a cap gun going off.

Afraid the shooter was going to shoot again, Pletke ran at him and managed to get a choke hold around his neck.

But when the shooter reached for the gun in his belt, Pletke said he ran, tripping over a curb and then hiding behind a truck parked close by.

“I was scared I was going to get shot,” he said.

Pletke testified that earlier that evening, he saw four pledges from another fraternity, one of whom was AfricanAmerican, come into the center patio area between the courtyard buildings. He politely told them to leave and went back into Brough and Piring’s apartment, where he said 15 to 20 people had gathered to hang out.

After five or 10 minutes, he said, the four pledges were still outside and he told them to leave again.

On cross-examination, he was unable to say whether the four he chased from the party were the same people involved in the altercation that led to the shooting.

Jones was with two other young men, not three. All of them are white.

That has been a frequent occurrence over the course of the trial: Stories have varied widely, depending on whether it was Brough’s fraternity brothers, Jones’ companions that evening, or uninvolved bystanders who were telling them.

The fraternity brothers described smaller numbers of people present at the party, and they didn’t see that there were any punches thrown, other than the sucker punch one partygoer threw at Jones early in the altercation.

Jones’ two friends — who did not think Jones was ultimately justified in shooting — described being pushed to the ground and having others throw drunken punches at them.

Pletke testified that he saw Brough and Piring standing 10 feet away from Jones when they were shot. But a medical examiner said last week that the muzzle of Jones’ gun was no more than 2 feet away from Brough when it fired.

Defense attorneys Burges McCowan and Josh Davidson have begun questioning whether the fraternity brothers are synchronizing their stories.

On Tuesday, for example, a witness named Zach Volpo, who was with Pletke when he tried to subdue Jones, said he didn’t contact police after the shooting because “I wanted to get to the hospital, to my friend, to my brother’s side, to help him fight for his life,” he said. “I was also praying, sir.”

Volpo said he then went to the fraternity house to pray with his friends.

Davidson retorted, “You wanted to be with your brothers and pray, or be with your brothers and get your story straight.” Volpo denied the allegation. On cross-examination, McCowan pressed Pletke, asking whether he had watched any of the live-streamed testimony or whether he and Volpo had compared notes, which is not allowed of witnesses.

Pletke denied that he had.