Prosecutor says evidence proved Dunn could not have been acting in self-defence when he killed Jordan Davis

A Florida man who shot dead a teenager in a dispute over blaring rap music simply “lost it” because the youth disrespected him, the jury at his murder trial heard on Wednesday.



State attorney Erin Wolfson said that the evidence against Michael Dunn, 47, proved that he could not have been acting in self-defence when he killed Jordan Davis, 17, during the confrontation at a Jacksonville gas station in November 2012.

Dunn shot “round after round after round” at an SUV in which Davis was sat and continued firing at the vehicle even as it sped away in an attempt to escape, with one of the victim’s friends at the wheel, Wolfson said during the prosecution’s two-hour closing argument.

He was enraged, she said, because Davis turned up the volume of what Dunn called the “rap-crap” despite being asked to turn it down.

“This defendant went crazy. He got angry at the fact that a 17-year-old kid decided not to listen to him. This defendant was disrespected by a 17-year-old teenager and he lost it. He wasn’t happy with Jordan Davis’s attitude.”

Dunn, who faces life imprisonment if convicted of one count of first-degree murder and three of attempted murder, has pleaded not guilty on the grounds of self-defence. He said the teenager pointed a shotgun at him when he asked “respectfully” for the music to be turned down, then emerged from the SUV swearing and threatening to kill him.

But Wolfson, highlighting what she said were numerous inconsistencies in Dunn’s own testimony on Tuesday, said it was a scenario that did not happen. “Nobody denies that Jordan was talking back,” she said. “[But] there was no gun. The only person who says there was is that defendant.”

She also challenged Dunn’s assertion that Davis was out of the SUV and moving towards him when he fired. “Jordan Davis was not outside the car,” she said, pointing out that the fatal bullet moved diagonally up through his torso.

“The only way for him to get shot like that was if his body was at an angle. He was sat in that seat, bending over, trying to get away from his ultimate killer.”

Dunn, Wolfson added, was already angry, telling his girlfriend that he hated “that thug music” as he pulled alongside the SUV at the gas station and heard thumping bass that rattled the vehicle’s body panels. That anger, she said, fuelled his decision to reach into his glove box, retrieve his 9mm pistol and fire at least 10 shots. “He wasn’t shooting to scare them off, he was shooting to kill, and aiming at Jordan Davis,” she said.

Judge Russell Healey has said he expects to send out the jury to deliberate its verdicts later on Wednesday, after hearing six days of evidence. The case has resurrected the debate over Florida’s Stand Your Ground self-defence laws and race relations seven months after the acquittal of George Zimmerman, a neighbourhood watch leader, for murdering Trayvon Martin, 17, in an encounter at a Sanford housing estate.

In both cases, the victims were unarmed black teenagers shot by older, white defendants with guns who claimed they were the ones under attack.

But unlike Zimmerman, who stayed on the scene and cooperated with detectives, Dunn fled to a nearby hotel with his girlfriend after the shooting and spent the evening watching movies, eating pizza and drinking wine.

He never called police and the following morning drove two and a half hours to his home in Satellite Beach, Florida, where he was arrested only because an eyewitness at the gas station recorded his car’s tag number.

“This defendant didn’t tell anyone because he thought he had gotten away with murder,” Wolfson told the jury. “These are not the actions of someone who shot in self-defence.

“Today’s the day that you all, as members of the jury, define what the defendant did on November 23rd 2012. This defendant may have forever silenced Jordan Davis but he cannot silence the truth.”