Donner made his desperation visible on the fourth day. The evidence was not going well. The body camera footage had been played twice, once at normal speed and once in a slowed version. The Pitts' doorbell footage had been authenticated and admitted, and the jury had watched in 4K resolution. A Garland City police officer sit in his cruiser for 117 seconds observing a man wash a car before activating his emergency lights without radio contact.
The three prior dismissed complaints had come in as pattern evidence through the testimony of each complainant, three black men from different parts of the city, describing encounters with Puit over four years that bore the structural fingerprint of the encounter on Maplewood Court. Each of them had filed complaints. Each had been dismissed. Each now sat in the gallery and watched the proceedings with the particular attention of people for whom this trial was about something larger than the formal charges. Donner had one card left.
He called Kyle Puit to the stand. Puit took the oath with a trembling hand. He sat in the witness chair with the posture of a man carrying something very heavy. Under Donner's direct examination, he wept. He described the morning as a patrol officer trying to do his job in an unfamiliar district.
He described his fear genuine. He said his voice breaking when a large man refused his commands. He described the baton deployment as an act not of aggression, but of desperation. He was quiet for a moment. He looked at the jury and then he said something that hadn't been in any prior statement.
Right before the camera picked up the audio, clearly said, his voice dropping to almost a whisper. He leaned toward me and he told me he said he was going to take my gun. The statement landed in courtroom 3B. The way unexpected things land in enclosed spaces, a pulse of changed air, a collective micro movement, a shifting of weight in chairs. Donner held the moment with the careful neutrality of a man watching the element he needed begin to work.
Two jurors in the front row were frowning, not with rejection, with consideration. The specific frown of people genuinely uncertain about something they thought they were certain about. On the gallery bench, Raymond watched Puit make the claim with the quiet, still attention of a man watching a trap close around someone who built it themselves. Marcus Webb stood for cross-examination with the serene composure of a man who has been waiting for exactly this. "Mr. Puit," he said, walking slowly toward the center of the floor.
"You claim you were frightened. You claim you were just a patrol officer in an unfamiliar area doing his job, overwhelmed by a situation that got away from him. He paused. "The state calls a rebuttal witness. He turned toward the back of the courtroom.