Attorneys differ over e-mails of Rocori suspect:
Some strange testimony out of the Rocori trial…
On the morning before the fatal shootings at Rocori High School, the accused gunman used a school computer to e-mail a farewell letter to another student.
John Jason McLaughlin’s chilling e-mail address? “sharpestshot290@yahoo.com”
The student who got that e-mail and others, Brittany Kelley, took the stand Friday as McLaughlin’s trial continued in St. Cloud.
Kelley, 16, tearfully told of the increasingly bizarre messages she had received from McLaughlin’s e-mail address during the summer before the shootings of Seth Bartell, 14, and Aaron Rollins, 17.
Two days before the shootings, an e-mail to Kelley from McLaughlin repeated the phrase “hi hi hi hi hi” for pages, before ending with “goodbye.”
One day before the shootings, another e-mail repeated “ok ok ok ok” for pages with brief interruptions for the phrases “i’m good” and “steve says hi too” before continuing on with the repeated “ok ok ok ok.”
Like that’s not enough, John Jason McLaughlin liked to write e-mails as a fictional girlfriend…
Some of the e-mails were written under the name Soki Renoko, a fictional girlfriend created by McLaughlin. Those repeatedly described him as a cold, steely action figure who beat up people who offended him or his family — and said he claimed to be a sniper.
Now, from the defense attorney…
Eller said the prosecution will use the e-mails to prove that McLaughlin planned the shootings and meant to kill that day, which is critical in making the first-degree murder charge stick. But Eller said he sees the e-mails as evidence of McLaughlin’s mental illness.
Yeah, he has a mental illness. He’s criminally insane. Isn’t it to be found not guilty by reason of insanity, don’t they have to prove that McLaughlin couldn’t tell the difference between right and wrong?
And this is the best quote of all…
Eller said McLaughlin believed he shot Bartell in the shoulder, not the forehead, and didn’t intend to kill anyone that day.
How can you get confused between the shoulder and head, especially considering he shot Seth Bartell at an almost point-blank range? Is it a defense attorney’s job to insult people’s intelligence? This isn’t even a jury trial so he’s basically insulting the judge’s intelligence.
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