Chantay Kangalee took the stand as a reluctant witness for her brother's killer on Tuesday and contradicted parts of the state's carefully built murder case against Baltimore police Officer Gahiji Tshamba.
Kangalee confirmed accounts that Tshamba pulled a gun on her brother, Tyrone Brown, outside a back entrance to Mount Vernon's Red Maple lounge in the early morning of June 5, 2010, after Brown had groped one of the officer's female friends.
But she added that Brown, a Marine veteran, pushed the off-duty officer and steadily advanced — with his hands held out — toward Tshamba, who was backing up with his gun drawn. The two men were about three feet apart, with Tshamba's back to an alleyway trash container, when the officer fired, unloading his service weapon into Brown, who struggled to push the Glock away, Kangalee said.
Her testimony put the officer — a much smaller man than Brown, who was 6 foot 2 and weighed 238 pounds — in a physically defensive position with no place to go, the opposite of earlier witness claims, which had Brown's back against the trash bin. And it appeared to offer a plausible reason for Tshamba to have felt threatened, as his lawyers say he did, even though Kangalee believes her brother was the victim.
Pieces of that scenario were echoed throughout the day during the bench trial, which seeks a judge's ruling instead of a jury's, by other defense witnesses, some of whom were longtime friends of Tshamba's, including the woman whose butt Brown had grabbed, triggering the fateful chain of events.
The woman, a 26-year-old hairdresser named Crystal Ramsey, took the stand after Kangalee on Tuesday. She said she was on her way home after hanging out in Canton with a group that included Tshamba, when the officer called to see if she was up for one more stop.
She turned the car around toward Red Maple lounge and met him and several others. They socialized for an hour or so, she said, and Tshamba, who was planning to drive to Washington, had one beer.
Sometime after 1 a.m., they were standing toward the back of Red Maple, on a ramp outside a rear door, when Brown approached Ramsey.
He had been out drinking at Eden's Lounge with his sister and some friends and was on his way back to Kangalee's car when he decided he wasn't quite done partying, according to various testimony.
Brown tried to pull his sister into Red Maple, which she said she mistook for the gay bar Club Hippo, and then came up behind Ramsey and grabbed a handful of her buttocks.
"He just smacks me, grabs my behind real hard" saying something like "'I want this,'" said Ramsey, who stands about 5 feet, 3 inches tall and today weighs 115 pounds — about 10 pounds more than she did a year ago.
She said she slapped Brown, who raised a fist as if to hit her, leading Tshamba to step in. He chastised Brown for "putting his hands on a woman," Ramsey said, and announced that he was "a police" — something Kangalee said she never heard.
Tshamba said "'Get on the ground, you're under arrest,'" Ramsey testified. She said Brown chased Tshamba in circles and lunged in the officer's direction.
It was an account closely matched by the next witness, Kya Atkinson, who is friends with Ramsey and Tshamba.
Assistant State's Attorney Kevin Wiggins tested the claims of both women with repetitive questions about the sequence of events. He sometimes laughed at their answers or made snide remarks that suggested he didn't believe them.
He mocked Ramsey's portrayal of Brown's fist rearing back, along with the idea that the men ran in circles, as Ramsey described. He surmised that it must have been some version of "freeze tag" or "ballet" when Atkinson brought it up again later.
"That's your story and you're sticking to it," he said, laughing.
Wiggins had planned to call Kangalee as a state's witness, but he rested his case Monday without her. He declined to comment then and again on Tuesday, citing a prosecution policy of not talking about ongoing cases.
Defense attorney James L. Rhodes said Wiggins didn't call Kangalee because the prosecutor knew her testimony was more aligned with Tshamba's version of events.
Kangalee still portrayed the officer as the aggressor, however, who brandished his weapon in an irrational act of machismo and refused to back down.
Tshamba aggressively waved the gun and purposely baited Brown, Kangalee said, daring him to "do it again [to Ramsey], do it again," and repeating the words "What you want to do?" while Brown moved toward him.
Kangalee said her brother moved to shield her and several other women standing in the area, then advanced on Tshamba, saying, "'Dude, just calm down, calm down, let me talk to you.'" She called out that there were police cars a block up at an intersection, she testified, but Tshamba still shot.
Brown fell after the last bullet was spent, struck a dozen times.
