Julianne Hing's dispatches from the trial of Johannes Mehserle, the BART police officer who was caught on video shooting an unarmed Oscar Grant in San Francisco last year, are really quite striking:
The night he shot Grant, [Mehserle] didn't really want to come into work. Not just because New Year's Eve was an all hands on deck night and no one ever got it off, but because there was something else weighing on him. "Normally, I wouldn't have minded it, but not so much that night," Mehserle said. "You had some issues going on at home, with your girlfriend, right?" Rains asked. "Yeah, she was put on bed rest that night," Mehserle offered. "But you went to work anyway," Rains said.
And by the time he came home to his pregnant girlfriend the next day, Mehserle had killed Oscar Grant, a 22-year-old unarmed father who had a fiancée of his own, and a daughter named Tatiana.
Read the whole thing.
-- A. Serwer
