In opening statements, Assistant District Attorney General Jan Norman tried to demonstrate that Reinking made conscious choices. Norman pointed out that Reinking purchased extra magazines in the days before the shooting and chose to take his most powerful weapon. He also went to the Waffle House about 3:20 a.m. on a Sunday, when it was especially busy.
Norman said that when Reinking was captured in a wooded area, he was able to understand and comply with police commands.
“The proof in this case is that Travis Reinking made a choice,” Norman said. “He made several choices that led to the shooting.”
Several of the police officers who responded to the crime scene testified on Monday about what they saw. Metropolitan Nashville Police Officer Brett Johns was the first person on the scene after the shooting. He was visibly upset, voice cracking and wiping tears, as he spoke about the dead and injured people he encountered, saying that even nearly four years later, “I think about it a lot.”
Johns described seeing Perez and Sanderlin dead outside the building. Inside, he saw Groves and her sorority sister, Sharita Henderson, under a booth near the door. He thought they were both dead until he heard Henderson make a noise and saw her blink. She couldn’t talk, but he asked her to blink again if she understood him. She blinked.
On the other side of the restaurant, Shantia Waggoner’s leg was nearly severed below the knee, held together “by very small amounts of skin and maybe some muscle,” Johns said. Her boyfriend, Dasilva, kept repeating that he was in pain; his arm hurt. Also in the Waffle House was Dasilva’s brother Abede Dasilva, who testified on Monday that he hid in a bathroom during the shooting.
“I was just laying there with him, telling him everything was going to be OK,” Abede Dasilva said through tears. He said he thought his brother had only been shot in the arm, but it turned out a bullet had pierced his lung.
The last thing his brother said to him was, “I can’t breathe,” he testified.
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This story has been corrected to show shooting was on a Sunday.
This article originally appeared on APNews.com.
