Pitiful testimony
Dispatcher recalls 911 ‘call that broke me’
A’Reco Fisher awoke on his living room couch to the sound of gunfire and the shouts of his older sister and her boyfriend, Sedrick Clayton, down the hall.
Pashea Fisher was pleading with Clayton not to shoot her parents, and screaming for A’Reco to call 911. Clayton fired anyway, killing Arithio Fisher where he stood in the doorway of his bedroom and mowing down Patricia Fisher in front of a television set still playing cartoons.
“I woke up, and I saw Clayton manhandling my sister in the hallway. He dragged her up to the front, told her he was going to shoot her,” he testified Tuesday. “I saw him shoot her in the head ... she fell out on the floor.”
On the first day of arguments in the triple-murder trial of 31-year-old Sedrick Clayton, prosecutors showed jurors an image of Pashea’s lifeless body from the waist down, curled on her side by the front door with dark blood on her lightwashed jeans.
A’Reco is the sole survivor of what prosecutor Karen Cook called an “attempt to annihilate the Fisher family.” He emerged physically unscathed from a bloodied, bullet-riddled home and recounted for jurors Tuesday the horrors of the day Sedrick Clayton killed all but one member of his immediate family.
If Clayton is convicted, prosecutors will ask the jury to sentence him to death.
Defense attorney Gerald Skahan told jurors in his opening remarks that they would never hear him dispute the fact that his client pulled the trigger. Instead, he asked them to listen closely to details — particularly the graphic 911 calls — to
determine his client’s state of mind.
Should the jurors decide Clayton committed a crime of passion and not of premeditation, they could convict him of a lesser charge, such as second- degree murder or voluntary manslaughter.
Along with three firstdegree murder charges, Clayton’s seven- count indictment charges him with the attempted murder of A’Reco Fisher, who testified that he thought Clayton was going to kill him, too, on the morning of Jan. 19, 2012.
Only one room in the home at 1626 Preston was without bullet holes after Clayton’s assault. Cook called A’Reco’s survival “amazing.”
Clayton left in Pashea’s Escalade with the young couple’s 4-year-old daughter, as A’Reco ran to his parents’ bedroom. Stepping past his father’s body in the doorway, he attended to his mother who, he said, was fighting for her life.
“I tried to use all my strength to bring her back,” he said.
In one of two graphic 911 calls played for jurors, a dispatcher was heard talking to A’Reco about the lo- cation, the condition of his family and the identity of the suspect before telling him to get a dry cloth to try to stop his mother’s bleeding while she moaned in the background.
In a call placed, presumably, by Arithio as he was dying, dispatcher Katie Montgomery testified that she tried in vain to elicit a response from the other end of the phone.
What she heard instead was gunfire, a little girl’s crying, and a few of Pashea Fisher’s last words.
“Sed, don’t kill my mom and dad! Don’t kill my mom and dad!” Then more gunfire, more screams and indistinguishable chaos.
As the tapes were played in court Tuesday, one woman in the gallery rushed from the courtroom in tears. Grave-looking jurors stared hard into space.
At the sound of Pashea’s breathless pleading, the defendant dropped his head and touched his eyes.
“That was the call that broke me,” said Montgomery, the dispatcher.
Prosecutor Jennifer Nichols called on numerous Memphis police officers to describe the scene at the South Memphis home. Sgt. Richard Borden said he was there when Clayton’s mother showed up unexpectedly, saying she’d talked to her son and that he wanted to turn himself in.
Over the course of numerous calls, some made from Clayton’s mother’s cellphone, the defendant told Borden that he wanted to turn himself in. He reassured authorities that his daughter was still with him and was safe. Borden said Clayton seemed “agitated” but was otherwise “cordial to me on the phone.”
Following the sergeant’s instructions, he unloaded the gun and put it on the floor of the car when he arrived at Raines Station. He was driven by an unidentified man, and accompanied by the mother of his older daughter. His 4-year-old child with Pashea, and his other daughter were in the car with him.