Defense rests in Hainstock trial:
First, let’s hear from Hainstock’s grandmother…
The last witness to testify was Hainstock?s grandmother, Irene Hainstock, who said Eric called her from jail after his arrest.
“What have you done,” she recalled asking her grandson. “I don’t know, grandma. Something snapped in my head,” was the response.
Some more students…
Other defense witnesses included five students at Weston who saw Eric enter the school with a shotgun and saw it taken away from him. None remembered hearing him say, “I’m here to (expletive) kill somebody,” as one witness recalled.
On cross-examination, however, most said they weren’t sure they could hear everything that was being said that day.
Now let’s hear from Hainstock himself…
In his own testimony, Hainstock said he brought the shotgun and pistol to the school to make people listen to him and did not intend to kill Klang.
Hainstock said he needed the weapons — a 20-gauge shotgun and a .22-caliber revolver — “because they would be scared,” he said, referring to people at the school. “If they were scared they’d listen, hopefully.”
Hainstock, 16, testified unemotionally as the first witness in the defense case after prosecutors rested their case Wednesday morning.
Mounting frustration with his home life and with persistent taunting at school led him to the desperate action, he said, which he said was not intended to hurt anyone.
But after Klang grabbed him from behind at the school, Hainstock testified, the gun went off.
“It was accidental,” he said. He heard a grunt from Klang, he said, who continued to hold him. Hainstock said a second shot, which struck Klang on the side of the head but did not penetrate his skull, was intended for Klang’s arm, to get Klang to let go of him.
Hainstock said he underestimated the lethal power of the .22.
“I didn’t think it would hurt nobody that bad because it was so little,” he said.
I don’t buy any of it. According to this article when asked by his attorney why Hainstock loaded the weapons he said it was “just a reaction.” Loading two separate weapons is not a reaction. That’s intent. And what did he think the .22 would do? Just bounce off people? And what if the shotgun was not taken from him. Did he think that a shotgun “wouldn’t hurt nobody?”
Anything less than a conviction of first-degree murder is a travesty of justice.
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