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During the first day of the murder trial for Roy Oliver, video footage showed that he was joking with a group of teens just moments before going ballistic and firing a rifle into a vehicle, killing Jordan Edwards.
—Murder trial for Texas police officer who killed 15-year-old Jordan Edwards to begin today—
On April 29, 2017 Oliver fired into a car containing 15-year-old Edwards, his brother and his friends, when the car attempted to leave a party. He has been charged with murder and two aggravated assault charges.
Balch Springs police Officer Tyler Gross, who was with Oliver when they received a 911 about rowdy teens at a party, testified on day one of the trial. He says he was just trying to stop the party full of teens from continuing, the Dallas News reports.
On the video footage, Gross goes inside the house while Oliver stays outside.
Oliver orders the teens to depart saying: “Let’s keep moving. Let’s keep moving.”
And then when a teen tries to sidestep a muddy spot, he can be heard joking: “Yeah it’s mud, not lava. Ain’t gonna hurt ya.”
But things took a turn for the worst when Oliver and gross seemed to get confused after gunshots they overheard. The officers were inside and the shots were not connected to the party but were instead coming from outside and later determined they were shots coming from a nearby nursing home.
A panicked, Gross ran outside and Oliver followed behind him. He radios in saying: “Shots fired.”
Oliver then runs to his police cruiser and grabs his rifle. Teenagers are running and screaming and the scene is chaotic.
—Should calling 911 on Black people for silly reasons be considered a hate crime?—
Gross sees teens “cowering in between houses.” An Impala tries to leave the scene and he sees the car reverse and then start to pull forward.
“I realized the vehicle was attempting to evade,” Gross testified.
Gross breaks the glass of the rear window and then hears gunshots coming from the right.
Oliver shot into the car.
“I saw the smoke from his weapon,” he said.
“You all right?” Oliver says on the body-cam recording.
Gross responds he was.
“He was trying to hit you,” Oliver responds.
But when lead prosecutor Michael Snipes asked Gross if he was afraid the car would hit him, Gross said no.
“I was not in fear at that point,” Gross said.
“He was an innocent child doing nothing wrong that night,” Snipes said of Jordan Edwards.
This is a developing story.