The 37-year-old married father of two from a Portland suburb said he pulled no punches when he filled out the juror questionnaire from federal court.

Would he give more credence to a law enforcement officer's testimony?

Officers are "heroes" as far as he's concerned, he responded. "I will always tend to give them the benefit of the doubt,'' he wrote.

So he was surprised when he was selected as one of nine men and three women to hear the case against W. Joseph Astarita, the FBI agent accused of lying to conceal that he fired two shots at refuge occupation spokesman Robert "LaVoy" Finicum.

He volunteered to be the presiding juror to help direct deliberations. No one else did, so the job was his.

Hours after he and the others voted Friday to acquit Astarita, the juror described his experience to The Oregonian/OregonLive -- from his changing thoughts about Astarita's honesty to his handshake with the agent after the trial ended.

"Let me be clear, the judge ordered us to set aside our prejudices,'' he said. "I feel I did that.''

One of the things that troubled him, he said, was the apparent "us vs. them'' tension between the FBI and Oregon State Police that pervaded the 2016 confrontation with Finicum and the aftermath. The animosity came out in the trial testimony, he said.

"I feel it's possible someone is lying," he said. "I don't know which side, or who, or it could be both. There's still two unattributed shots, and I feel like we're never going to know for sure who took them.''

He also said he "felt like a pendulum going back and forth during the trial -- from 'oh man, he definitely did it' and then 'well, maybe, he didn't.'''

The juror asked that he not be identified by name, concerned about facing potential backlash over the trial's outcome. He also didn't want to talk about the views of other jurors.

In the final analysis: With no direct testimony from a witness or damning physical evidence that definitively tied Astarita to the disputed shots, he believed more than one person could have fired them. Not knowing who fired, it was impossible to conclude that Astarita's denials were lies, he said.

"It's not my job to know who shot," he said. "It's my job to find out if these facts were proven beyond a reasonable doubt, and they weren't.''

Prosecutors had argued that Astarita, 41, was the only officer at a roadblock on U.S. 395 who could have fired a bullet that pierced the roof of Finicum's truck on Jan. 26, 2016. The shot came as Finicum was stepping out with his hands in the air after swerving into a snowbank at the roadblock north of Burns. The other shot missed.

They maintained that Astarita, a member of the FBI's elite Hostage Rescue Team, panicked and took those shots, but when he missed his target, he told his supervisors and investigators that he hadn't fired.

Two and a half years after the shooting, no one has acknowledged taking the shots.

Astarita's lawyers argued that the government's forensic analysis of the bullet's path, which included a 5-degree margin of error, was flawed. They had their own expert present a much wider range of potential bullet paths, showing two other officers who could have taken the disputed shots.

The presiding juror said he believed the trajectory fell somewhere in the middle of the two analyses.

"I was a little bit more comfortable with presenting the trajectory as a range,'' he said. But he felt the defense depiction was far too expansive.

He was impressed by a demonstration from the government's expert, Michael Haag, showing his method for determining the bullet's path, despite defense attempts to debunk it.

Haag, he said, came across as knowledgeable and "super confident'' as he climbed a ladder and knelt on top of Finicum's truck, which had been towed into the courthouse loading dock one day.

Haag placed the tip of a yellow rod into the "lead-in'' point where the bullet first struck the roof's metal, rocking it until it fell into place, securing it with tape and a clamp and then measuring the horizontal and vertical angles.

The presiding juror asked to climb the ladder beside the truck and see the bullet hole himself. Four other jurors followed suit.

"I'm really glad I looked at it,'' he said. The photo presented of the bullet hole, identified as "Impact W'' by investigators, was taken at an angle, he said. "I wanted to look at it directly from the top and see how symmetrical it was.''

He felt the defense did succeed in casting doubt on the work of a state forensic scientist in arguing that she failed to consider the settling of Finicum's truck into the snow between the time the shots were fired, the time photos were taken and when she measured the truck's angle in the snowbank.

"In this kind of case, you have to be sure,'' he said, noting that any slight deviation "could change who the shooter was.''

He said he placed less reliance on the circles that FBI Hostage Rescue Team agents and two state police SWAT officers drew on still images of the shooting scene projected on a computer monitor at the witness stand.

The circles were supposed to denote their general locations at the time of the disputed shots. But the stylus used to mark their spots appeared to be extremely sensitive. As a result, several witnesses had to erase their initial circles and try a second time.

"Nothing drawn on the screen was precise,'' he said, echoing one of the defense arguments made repeatedly during trial.

So the juror instead put more weight on the video images taken from two FBI surveillance planes to determine the officers' locations.

"If I look at the freakin' video and see where people were standing, I felt there were three individuals that could've taken that shot: Officer 1, FBI agent B.M. and the defendant,'' he said.

He said he also found Astarita more credible than Officer 1, a state police SWAT member. Authorities haven't disclosed the officer's name for security reasons. In the courtroom and in court documents, he was referred to only as Officer 1.

The turning point for the presiding juror came when defense lawyers countered Officer 1's testimony on how he may have loaded his rifle magazine.

Officer 1 said he routinely loaded the magazine to capacity and then stripped one round out, leaving 29 bullets in the magazine. The prosecution presented evidence that the officer's two spare magazines held 29 rounds that night as well. When his rifle was examined after the shooting, his magazine had 24 bullets remaining.

That accounted for the three shots he fired into the front of Finicum's truck as it barreled toward the roadblock and the two shots he fired later, striking Finicum in the back and killing him. The fatal shots came moments after the disputed shots as Finicum walked away from his truck and reached into his inner jacket pocket where police said he had a loaded pistol.

Yet the defense showed that when Officer 1 used a handgun, he usually "topped it off" - meaning it was filled to capacity with one more round in the chamber. Then they produced an investigative report that found the capacity in Officer 1's rifle was 31 rounds, suggesting that the rifle magazine had 30 rounds with one in the chamber.

With 31 rounds in Officer 1's rifle when he started that day and 24 remaining at the end, that could have allowed for a total of seven shots taken, including the two disputed shots, the juror said.

The defense also raised questions about Officer 1's truthfulness on the stand, the juror said.

While Officer 1 said he told investigators last year that he had been startled by a noise to his right at the time of the disputed shots, the lead detective for the shooting investigation testified on cross-examination that neither he nor other investigators had heard Officer 1 mention the noise until a month before trial.

In contrast, the juror found Astarita poised, articulate and credible as a witness.

"You could tell that he was very prepared,'' he said.

But he said he saw an unguarded moment when Astarita was handed his Colt AR-15 rifle by a prosecutor during cross-examination. Astarita immediately turned back with a quizzical look, "Can I just ask why the safety's off?''

"He was really extremely concerned. He snapped out of anything that was rehearsed,'' the juror said.

As Astarita was asked to demonstrate how he holds his rifle at a low-ready stance, the juror felt Astarita clearly knew what he was doing and astutely articulated each step of his decision-making process in deciding whether to shoot in a given situation.

"That made me feel more strongly that he just might not have been the shooter,'' the juror said.

But the flippant remark Astarita gave his supervisor at the scene when asked if he had shot his gun disturbed the juror. Astarita responded: "You don't get to ask me that bro,'' others testified.

That certainly raised suspicions about Astarita, the juror said, yet he felt "that little piece of information alone is not enough."

He also thought the infrared aerial video that caught figures scouring the ground and looking under trucks after the shooting might have shown officers trying to pick up bullet casings to hide their tracks or might have been a standard check for sensitive items or lost gear as FBI agents testified.

But it was impossible to identify who the figures were on the video, he said.

In three weeks, the jury listened to 11 days of testimony from more than 40 witnesses.

The presiding juror admitted that it was sometimes challenging to stay focused through repeated showings of FBI aerial videos of the scene and the testimony of a defense witness vacationing in Spain whose phone disconnected every 15 minutes,. He could be seen occasionally drinking from a can of Monster triple-shot espresso. Another juror had brought in a 12-pack of the drink to share early in the trial.

This was the presiding juror's first time serving on a jury. While he said he's now eager to return to his technical support job in a large law firm, he came away impressed with the lawyers on each side.

"I think the prosecution built the best case that they could given what they had to work with,'' he said.

After the jurors returned their verdict and left the courtroom, U.S. District Judge Robert E. Jones thanked them. The defense team, along with Astarita, soon afterward entered the jury room.

Astarita and his four lawyers shook each juror's hand, thanking them for their service.

Astarita addressed them briefly. He reiterated how passionate he was about serving as an FBI agent. He spoke of how he never thought he'd be accused of a crime and described how he lay in a fetal position after learning he was going to be charged, the presiding juror recalled.

Tearing up, Astarita said "how we'd given him his life back, and he was grateful.''

-- Maxine Bernstein

mbernstein@oregonian.com

503-221-8212

@maxoregonian