Jonathan Bun told police his mind "went blank" when he shot Clayton County Sheriff’s Deputy Richard “Rick” Daly last July.
In the third day of Bun’s trial for allegedly killing Daly, prosecutors revealed video of the initial interview the teen gave investigators hours after the shooting.
“I thought with my hands and not my head,” Bun said, explaining the shooting in an hour-long interview with a GBI agent and a Clayton County District Attorney’s investigator.
And at the end of the interview, he asked them his fate.
“Am I [eligible] for the death penalty?” Bun asked.
Bun was 17 on July 20 when he was accused of shooting Daly twice, killing the more-than-20-year deputy during an attempt to serve an arrest warrant on an armed robbery charge.
What followed the shooting that July afternoon was an hours-long manhunt in a wooded area just outside of Riverdale as police from dozens of metro Atlanta agencies responded to an “officer down” call and attempted to find Bun.
Now 18, he is facing life in prison without the possibility of parole for charges that include malice murder, felony murder, aggravated assault on a peace officer and gun possession during the commission of a felony.
Thursday morning, Bun looked on in a red button-up shirt and black slacks at the video of himself confessing to police.
Early in the interview, he recounted to the investigators that he had no intention of shooting Daly, and certainly not to kill him.
“I didn’t want to do it,” Bun told the investigators in the video, recorded during the early morning hours the day after the shooting and his arrest.
“Everything went by so fast. I cocked the gun and I shot.
“The plan was to put down the gun. I wanted to put it down. My mind went blank.”
He said he assumed Daly was wearing a bulletproof vest and tried to shoot in the area that the vest covered.
“If I wanted to kill him, I would have aimed for his head,” Bun told the investigators in the video. “I thought police under their uniform wore Kevlar. I aimed directly at his chest.”
He said he’d seen in movies that people wearing protective vests were hurt, but not killed, when a shot hit the armor plating.
“I was trying to put him down and run,” Bun said.
But Bun miscalculated his aim and said he had no idea one of his shots was fatal.
From the stand Thursday, both DA’s investigator Steve Payne and GBI associate medical examiner Dr. Jonathan Eisenstat testified that one shot went between the two panels of Daly’s vest, hitting him in the left side of his lower abdomen. The other bullet Bun fired, Eisenstat said, went into Daly's arm and through his lungs.
In the video, Bun said he fired several times, then his gun jammed. He said another officer, Daly’s partner Minh Doan, began firing, and he fled to a nearby tree line.
While hiding from police in the woods, Bun said he contemplated suicide but thought of his family and loved ones.
“I was just going to shoot myself in the shed I was [hiding] in,” he said. “I knew it was a no-win situation. I knew when they caught me, [police] were going to shoot me or beat the crap out of me.”
He called his parents, first reaching out to his mother.
“Mom, I shot a police officer,” Bun said, acknowledging to the investigators that he still considered flight even after she told him to turn himself in.
Then he talked to his father.
“I apologized to him and said, ‘Dad, I did some stupid stuff,”' Bun said.
He said his father also urged him to surrender.
Prosecutors also said during opening statements that Bun sent a text message to an apparent girlfriend while hiding from the manhunt.
“I just shot a police,” the text message read. “I’m sorry, but my time ends here. I love you. Make sure the next guy treats you right.”
Testimony continues Thursday afternoon.
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