Attorneys for a Southwest Georgia man accused of beating an Army reservist at a Clayton County Cracker Barrel last year repeatedly hammered the victim's credibility and character as the trial got underway Wednesday.
The jury – nine whites, three blacks and two Asians – heard opening arguments from both sides and then testimony from Tasha Hill, her eight-year-old daughter and a man who was at Cracker Barrel the evening of Sept. 9, 2009, celebrating his father’s birthday with family and friends.
Defense attorney Tony Axam portrayed Hill as a hothead who used her military status to intimidate people. Her temper got her into fights with neighbors and strangers, Axam said, citing a 2005 incident at Southlake Mall in which Hill was arrested for, in her own words, making “terrorist threats” against a woman.
The defense also played a 15-minute recording captured on Hill’s cellphone by 911 operators involving an explosive, obscenities-laden exchange between the reservist and her neighbors. Hill supposedly threatened the neighbors and their teenage sons after her home was burglarized.
"Her character is unbelievable,” Axam, an Atlanta criminal attorney from Atlanta who is representing Troy Dale West, told the jury.
Clayton County District Attorney Tracy Graham Lawson told the jury not to be sidetracked by the defense’s efforts to discredit Hill. Lawson said West beat up Hill, while yelling racial obscenities at her.
“The whole purpose is to divert you from what happened, to make you dislike the victim so much that you will say she deserved what happened to her,” Lawson said. “Please focus on what happened. Your job is to ascertain the facts.”
The defense also introduced a videotape from a Cracker Barrel surveillance camera to further discredit Hill’s claim that West’s assault was unprovoked. West had come to Metro Atlanta last year for treatment for injuries sustained in an accident. He has alleged he hit Hill after she spit on him. Hill has repeatedly denied that allegation.
The first witness to take the stand, Hill tearfully recounted how the incident has left her and her daughter traumatized. Both have nightmares and are under doctors’ care for post traumatic stress, she said. She testified her daughter’s grades have slipped and she has become afraid of large white men with pony tails, just as West wore on the day of the incident. Hill recalled tearfully how she had to leave a grocery store recently after a large white man brushed passed her.
Hill and her daughter had gone to Cracker Barrel that evening to have dinner. Hill sustained bruises, head and knee injuries in the incident.
“I heard my daughter screaming,” she recalled after being hit.
She Hill said after the assault occurred, when West and his wife left the restaurant, she and a Cracker Barrel manager followed him as they called police.
The case, which has drawn local and national attention, drew a packed court room.
“Clearly the only hope in this case is for the defense to draw jurors attention away from the facts,”said Derrick Boazman, a former Atlanta city councilman who is now a community activist and who has been following the case closely for his radio show. “Whether provoked or unprovoked, Hill is 100 pounds smaller and foot shorter [than West]. It’s now incumbent upon the process to remind jurors did Troy Dale West beat Tasha Hill?
The packed courtroom was cleared of spectators when Hill’s daughter testified. During her 30-minute testimony, she read from a two-paged handwritten note describing the incident.
“I saw him hurt her in a bad way,” she told Lawson.
When asked if she saw the man in the courtroom who attacked her mother, she said no. West sat at the defense table dressed in a blue shirt and gray tie, looking markedly different from the pictures shown of him that day in an Hawaiian shirt, beard and pony tail.
The day's last witness of the day, Todd Oswalt, recounted how he saw Hill and West have a “stern” exchange before Hill allegedly spit on West. Oswalt testified West then hit Hill several times while holding her head.
“It was milliseconds,” Oswald said. “He hit her with his right hand. It was like a reaction. After the first punch he was holding her head and punched her two more times.”
After she fell to the floor, Oswalt said Hill was “trying to protect herself. She was balled up in the corner.”
When asked by assistant district attorney Jason Green if it looked like Hill purposely spat on West, Oswalt replied, “It looked intentional.”
The trial resumes Thursday at 8:30 a.m. at the Justice Center.
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