Defendant, witness differ on details of deadly attack
Accused murderer Dustin Jimenez said he fired at someone in the middle of a big street brawl on Kamehameha Highway in Sunset Beach in May last year because he thought that person was going to attack him.
"I seen, like one flash, somebody running towards me on my side," he said. "I just reacted."
Jimenez, 22, of Wahiawa, is on trial in Circuit Court for second-degree murder in the shooting death of Dillon Ching, 30, and other charges. His lawyer said Jimenez shot Ching in self-defense or while experiencing extreme mental or emotional disturbance.
Jimenez said that during the fighting he saw two people with bats and was afraid of the person he fired at because he appeared to be one of them.
"I was just scared that he had one bat and he probably going bash my head in," Jimenez said.
He said it happened so quickly he did not even see the person's face before he fired.
But Ching's wife, Desiree, who had testified before Jimenez, said Jimenez not only had time to see her husband's face before he fired, he even taunted her husband.
"He said, 'What, you wanna act, f----? You wanna act?'"
Ching testified she then heard two shots fired in quick succession, "almost simultaneous."
Honolulu Medical Examiner Kanthi De Alwis said one shot entered Dillon Ching's body on the right side near the rib cage and exited at the lower back without hitting any bones or internal organs.
The other shot entered Ching's body on the right side of the neck, just above the collarbone, traveled toward the lower part of the body, hit a rib, punctured a lung and fractured a vertebra before stopping just under the skin in the back, she said.
Ching bled to death from the injury to his right lung.
De Alwis said Ching was bending forward when the shots hit him, and the first shot was probably the one that entered near the rib cage.
Ching had just arrived at his family home just before midnight May 19, 2007, from a party with his wife and then-3-year-old son. People who had been drinking there were fighting with a group of people, including Jimenez, who had been drinking across the street at an area known as Pine Trees.
Desiree Ching said her husband was trying to find out what was going on when Jimenez shot him.