A prosecutor told jurors Thursday that a man accused of beating another man to death with an aluminum baseball bat could not have been acting in self-defense.

Stephen Reichow, 35, struck Brandon Maulding nearly 20 times in the head with the bat during an altercation Aug. 1, 2015, outside a storage facility in Battle Ground, Deputy Prosecutor James Smith said during opening statements in Reichow’s murder trial in Clark County Superior Court.

The two Battle Ground men were acquaintances. Maulding, who was 36, was later pronounced dead at an area hospital.

Smith argued that the level of violence indicates it was not self-defense.

“A picture can be worth a thousand words, and I think this picture says a lot,” Smith said as he flashed a grisly photo of Maulding’s body across a large screen. “He beat him to a pulp.”

Reichow’s defense attorney, Sean Downs, argued that there are two sides to every story and “sometimes three, four, five. It’s not always going to fit together perfectly for you,” he told the jury.