Brandon Grimes took the witness stand in his own defense Thursday, telling jurors he was simply waiting for a ride when “shots rang out” from an unknown direction — injuring him in the same block where the plainclothes police detective he is charged with murdering was fatally shot.
“I never had no gun,” testified Grimes, who police say had been arrested 17 times before he murdered Detective Troy Chesley Jan. 9, 2007 during a botched robbery.
Grimes, 23, also attempted to pin Chesley’s murder on his friend, Joshua Morris, alleging Morris was the owner of a black bandanna taken into evidence that contained gun shot residue.
In more than two hours of testimony in Baltimore City Circuit Court, Grimes told a version of events that painted him as an innocent victim of a shooting who cooperated with police — an account prosecutors say contradicted nearly all the other evidence in the case.
“I had nothing to hide,” he said of his willingness to help detectives.
He testified that Morris and a female friend, Kelly Carter, planned to pick him up on Fairfax Road in Northwest Baltimore on the night of Chesley’s death.
While waiting for the ride, Grimes said he heard a minute’s worth of gunshots and felt pain in his leg, but the block was “too dark” for him to see who was doing the shooting.
“I just heard a lot of gunshots,” he said.
Bleeding profusely, Grimes said he hopped to find Carter and Morris, who drove him in a van to St. Agnes Hospital.
There, according to prosecutors, Grimes told a nurse he had been robbed “of everything” and shot.
When prosecutor Kevin Wiggins asked Grimes to explain the different versions of his story — the robbery versus the apparently random shooting — Grimes’ answer drew chuckles from some jurors: “Someone was trying to rob me of my life.”
During cross-examination, Grimes admitted it was his hat left in a trail of his blood leaving the murder scene — a statement he later backed away from. He also denied that the 9mm Sig Sauer gun found by the blood trail was his.
“Y’all messed my blood all up,” he told Wiggins. “It could be my blood. It could not be my blood. …How could I know y’all didn’t move in and put it there?”
During closing arguments, Wiggins called Grimes’ testimony “total fiction.”
“If you believe him, everybody in this case lied to you, except him,” the prosecutor told jurors.
He pointed out that Carter identified Grimes as holding the Sig Sauer handgun — with an extended clip to hold extra bullets and a laser sight for increased accuracy — in the moments before police say the gun was used to kill Chesley.
“This is a business gun … and his business is the business of murder,” Wiggins said.
The prosecutors told jurors the only reason police were able to catch Grimes is that Chesley was able to return fire — shooting Grimes and causing the then-21-year-old to leave a blood trail at the scene.
Sitting in the witness stand, Wiggins said Chesley’s bullet had the same effect as if the plainclothes cop had testified: “Brandon Grimes murdered me.”
Grimes’ attorney, Roland Walker, criticized Wiggins for pretending to be Chesley speaking from the grave.
“We’re not dealing with theatrics,” Walker said. “We’re dealing with facts and humanity.”
Walker said the state’s case relies solely on circumstantial evidence, pointing to a lack of conclusive DNA, gunshot residue, and fingerprint evidence against Grimes.
“We don’t guess people guilty,” he said.
He also implicated Morris as the true murderer — saying Grimes’ friend was a member of the Crips street gang.
“Crips, they’ll go out and they’ll kill just to prove their manhood,” Walker said.
The jury deliberated for an hour Thursday and is expected to continue doing so today. Grimes, the father of two children, faces up to life in prison if he’s convicted of first-degree murder.
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