"She looked at me like, "Why?' " Paula Gutierrez says of Officer Lois Marrero.
By KEVIN GRAHAM
Published May 15, 2003
[Times photo: Fraser Hale]
As defense attorney DeeAnn Athan stands beside her, Paula Gutierrez testifies Wednesday on how her boyfriend, Nestor DeJesus, choked her.
TAMPA - Paula Gutierrez told jurors Wednesday that her eyes locked with those of dying Officer Lois Marrero after her boyfriend gunned down the policewoman in an apartment parking lot.
"She was shocked and she looked at me and I looked at her, and it was just me and her at that moment," Gutierrez told jurors. "She looked at me like, "Why?' "
While medical experts testified earlier this week that one of the bullets Nestor DeJesus fired at Marrero may have immobilized her immediately, Gutierrez said the officer took a few steps toward her before collapsing.
"We just kept eye contact, then she put her head against the car to try to get some air, and we're still looking at each other and she falls right next to me and she started bleeding all over the place," said Gutierrez.
The recounting of Marrero's last moments alive was the emotional climax of testimony by the defendant Wednesday in Circuit Judge J. Rogers Padgett's courtroom.
In her second day on the witness stand, Gutierrez wept loudly as she told how DeJesus shot Marrero after the officer pleaded with him to drop his gun.
Gutierrez, 25, was the only witness to take the stand Wednesday. Prosecutor Jay Pruner will continue cross-examining her today.
Gutierrez's boyfriend, Nestor DeJesus, killed himself during a three-hour standoff with police after he shot and killed Marrero.
Prosecutors are charging Gutierrez under the felony-murder law because she is accused in a bank robbery they say lead to Marrero's murder.
Gutierrez used the bank robbery as one more example of a pattern of fear that she claims made it impossible for her to resist DeJesus. They pulled up to the Bank of America at Church Avenue and Neptune Street, and he handed her a gun and a bandana to cover her face.
He ran inside, expecting her to follow, but she lingered in the car for a moment. She only went through with the robbery because she thought he would beat her later if she didn't, she testified.
She also testified that while in New York and pregnant with their daughter, DeJesus pulled a Swiss Army knife on her and pressed it against her stomach at a bus stop after she yelled at him for looking at other women during a trip to the movies.
"He wanted to kill me, but he couldn't because he said I was pregnant," Gutierrez said.
DeJesus's temper grew worse over time, Gutierrez testified. When DeJesus got upset, he had begun punching holes in the walls at their Crossings Apartments home, she said.
"There's never a calm argument with him," said Gutierrez.
The last straw, she said, came in March 2001, when Gutierrez said she found pornographic photographs and two phone numbers in DeJesus's work truck and confronted him about it.
DeJesus said he wasn't cheating, she told jurors. The photographs, he said, were from the Internet.
Still, she had had enough. The two argued, she said. DeJesus threw her on the ground and began punching and kicking her, she said.
Gutierrez described his fits of anger as if DeJesus went into a trance. "He snaps and he has that blank stare in his face," she said.
That night, Gutierrez said, she took their daughter and flew home to New York to be with her parents.
She had never left before, she said, because DeJesus had always threatened to harm her and her family if she did.
"He said I would find you wherever you are," Gutierrez said. "He knew my mother's Social Security number. He had memorized it by heart."
Pruner tried to discount Gutierrez's claim that DeJesus would kill her if she didn't do what he asked, and tried to prove that she had a bad temper herself. She ran away from home at 13, Pruner said, and noted that she caused so much trouble for her parents, they sent her back to their native Colombia, and she returned after her parents received a suicide letter from her.
During her eight-year on-again-off-again relationship with DeJesus, she never told anyone about the abuse from him because she was ashamed, she said.
Pruner said there were times early in their relationship while in New York when she called the police on DeJesus and asked her why she was so intent on saying she couldn't call them when they moved to Florida.
"You knew that protection from Nestor DeJesus was only a phone call away," he said.
