An FBI agent accused of lying to conceal that he shot twice at the truck of refuge occupation spokesman Robert "LaVoy" Finicum in 2016 strode to the witness stand Tuesday and declared he has never fired his weapon in the line of duty.

After sitting through hours of forensic testimony about bullet angles and camera imaging, jurors appeared significantly more attentive when W. Joseph Astarita, who identified himself as "Joe Astarita'' to the court, was sworn in about 3:50 p.m.

He described his upbringing in New York, education at Hofstra University, his brief professional lacrosse career and his extensive training as an FBI SWAT officer and then the elite Hostage Rescue Team.

Clean-shaven and wearing a gray suit, white shirt and blue-and-pink striped tie, Astarita looked markedly different from when he was manning a roadblock on U.S. 395 in eastern Oregon more than two years ago.

Then, he was clad in camouflage tactical gear and sporting a thick beard as the FBI and state police moved in to arrest the leaders of the armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.

Defense lawyer Robert Cary asked Astarita general questions that touched on the criminal charges the agent faces, but didn't get into the specifics of his actions that led to his federal indictment.

Astarita has pleaded not guilty to two charges of making false statements to FBI supervisors and one count of obstruction of justice stemming from his interview with state police detectives the night of the shooting.

"Have you ever, sir, removed shell casings from a scene?" Cary asked.

"No, I have not,'' Astarita said.

Astarita described in detail the "precision, surgical shooting'' training he received as part of the Hostage Rescue Team. Cary then asked Astarita a question central to the case: Did he ever fire a gun on the job?

"I've never fired my weapon in the line of duty,'' Astarita responded, looking straight at jurors, his hands resting on the witness stand.

Astarita, 41, testified how he's trained to shoot with both eyes, not one eye closed, to get a full visual awareness or horizon. He stepped off the stand briefly and identified the parts of his camouflaged rifle shown on a nearby screen. He then stood before jurors and demonstrated, using just his hands, how he would hold his rifle at a low-ready position, the muzzle slightly down and looking over his rifle sight with both eyes.

Before he fires, he'd have to see his target and determine that the shot met the bureau's threshold for use of force -- that the target poses an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury to himself or another person.

Astarita was on the stand for about 40 minutes, speaking calmly and maintaining eye contact with jurors. He will return to the stand Wednesday morning to continue, the last of five witnesses the defense has called.

Prosecutors contend Astarita is the only one at the scene who could have fired two shots at Finicum's truck after Finicum swerved into a snowbank at the roadblock and then stepped from the truck, with his hands in the air. One shot hit the roof of the truck, the other missed, investigators said.

Astarita's lawyers contend three officers at the scene could have fired the shot, but it was most likely the state police SWAT officer who fired five other shots that day, including two that hit and killed Finicum moments later. A second state police SWAT officer also fired and hit Finicum once.

The two SWAT officers fired as Finicum walked away from his truck and reached inside his jacket, where he had a loaded 9mm Ruger handgun.

Astarita's testimony followed a defense forensic expert, a statistician, an auto mechanic and a 3D animator, who all tried to discredit the forensic analyses and reconstruction of the shooting scene by government experts.

Astarita, in a distinctive New York accent, told jurors how his No. 1 goal in life was to become an FBI agent, following in the footsteps of his father, who was an FBI agent and now works in private security. He said he adores his father and felt he had the skill set "to serve my country that way.''

Astarita was born in New York, one of five children. His mother was a school teacher, his father served in the Army before joining the FBI. Astarita got a bachelor's degree in psychology and a master's degree in education at Hofstra. He played lacrosse throughout college and then played a year of professional lacrosse, but the $200 or so he was paid for each game wasn't going to cut it as a career, he said.

He first joined the FBI as professional support staff in October 2001, assigned to the New York counter-terrorism surveillance unit, just a month after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center. He began the FBI academy in April 2005, graduating in August of that year to become an FBI agent.

It was at the academy, Astarita said, that he learned that shell casings at the scene of a shooting are evidence that shouldn't be disturbed.

Prosecutors contend Astarita and other Hostage Rescue Team agents scoured the scene of the Finicum shooting, bending under trucks, and removed shell casings. They played an infrared video taken from an FBI plane on the night of the Jan. 26, 2016, shooting that showed officers walking throughout the scene. Of eight shots fired, only two shell casings were recovered by investigators.

But Cary's questioning of Astarita didn't get that far Tuesday.

Astarita spent eight years as an FBI field agent in the New York criminal division, from 2005 through 2013. He applied and was selected for the FBI SWAT team in 2007, remaining in New York.

From his academy days, though, Astarita told jurors he was intrigued by the bureau's Hostage Rescue Team and impressed by its motto, reciting the Latin, "Servare Vitas, to save lives.'' He said he wanted to see if he had "what it takes'' and applied twice to join the team. He wasn't chosen in 2009 and applied a second time in 2013, despite his parents' misgivings.

"If not me who,'' Astarita said he thought, who's going to do this dangerous work, noting he's single without children.

His parents came to understand "it was something I needed to test myself,'' Astarita said.

He was selected to join the Hostage Rescue Team in 2013 after what he described as a grueling selection process that tested such things as his physical fitness with 10-mile runs and distance swims, shooting ability with a pistol, rifle and shotgun, "judgment evolution'' and exams to root out any water, height or other phobias.

Once on the Hostage Rescue Team, he went through new officer training that started with a month of shooting drills, in which he estimated he fired 25,000 rounds, and underwent close-quarter battle scenarios to resemble hostage situations and assaults on planes, buses and trains.

The team's new officer training ensures its officers are adept at "precision, surgical shooting'' with others around them, Astarita said.

Earlier Tuesday, Matthew Noedel, a forensic consultant who spent 15 years working in the Washington State Police crime lab, cited pitfalls in government expert Michael Haag's use of the so-called "Rocker Point'' method to determine the trajectory of the bullet that struck the roof of Finicum's truck.

Noedel said he doesn't feel comfortable using that method, particularly when a bullet hole is as wide in diameter as the one left in the roof of Finicum's cab, suggesting it was three times larger than that of a .223-caliber rifle round.

Noedel said he couldn't pinpoint a horizontal angle from which the bullet originated using that method, only a range of angles.

That essentially substantially widens the cone for the bullet's potential path, and places others, besides Astarita, as the potential shooter.

He also found inaccuracies in the method used by state police forensic examiner Valerie Dickerson, who placed a rod through the roof hole and a hole in the lining inside the cab.

He said he could only identify a large area from where the bullet that hit the roof originated - "best described as having come from over there somewhere.''

Clifford Spiegelman, a statistician who teaches at Texas A&M University, examined the test gunshots Haag had taken to support his margin of error of 5 degrees.

Spiegelman and Noedel said there's no scientific basis or published literature to support the 5-degree margin of error, and Spiegelman said the steps Haag took to do so were based on a "completely ridiculous design'' and sample with too few shots.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Gary Sussman portrayed Spiegelman as a "fairly frequent critic of science,'' citing a litany of opinion pieces he has authored, including one in 2012 that was titled "Forensic Science lacks Science.''

Eugenio Luscio, the last defense witness before Astarita, is an adjunct professor at the University of Toronto who teaches 3D scene reconstruction and has his own company, AI23D, for Animation, Imaging, Illustration 3D.

Luscio overlayed the angle ranges that Noedel obtained for the path of the disputed roof shot on the 3D shooting scene model, and it significantly expanded the bullet trajectory cone to a trajectory triangle that encompassed Astarita and others.

Luscio called government expert Toby Terpstra's 3D model of the scene based on matching of multiple camera shots camera "completely subjective,'' and said Terpstra ''overstated'' his claims of accuracy.

-- Maxine Bernstein

mbernstein@oregonian.com

503-221-8212

@maxoregonian