A young man who was sitting inches from Oscar Grant when he was fatally shot by a former BART police officer said Monday that the officer, Johannes Mehserle, had blurted out a common term of shock.

"I remember Officer Mehserle saying, 'Oh s-, I shot him,' " Carlos Reyes testified at Mehserle's murder trial.

Grant, meanwhile, "kind of looked back and said, 'You shot me. You shot me,' " Reyes recalled.

On the third day of trial, jurors were taken as close as they have been to the shooting on Jan. 1, 2009, at BART's Fruitvale Station in Oakland. But they were given a picture open to interpretation, as both the prosecution and defense hope Reyes' testimony helps them.

Reyes bolstered the prosecution's central argument when he said that the unarmed Grant - his friend of about a decade - never resisted Mehserle, 28, as he tried to handcuff him after a fight on a train.

At the same time, the defense believes Mehserle's immediate reaction to the shooting proves their assertion that he meant to subdue Grant with a Taser when Grant wouldn't give up his hands. Confused under pressure, Mehserle accidentally pulled out and fired his service pistol, the defense says.

Jurors also learned Monday that minutes before the shooting, Grant spoke to his girlfriend. Although Grant and his friends had been detained, and were sitting against a station wall surrounded by officers, Grant picked up when Sophina Mesa called his cell phone.

'They're beating us'

"He picked up my call and he said, 'They're beating us up for no reason, I'll call you back.' And then he hung up," Mesa testified. She said Grant, with whom she was raising a daughter, had sounded scared.

Deputy District Attorney David Stein believes the phone call supports his contention that a fearful Grant, 22, would not have resisted officers.

Defense attorney Michael Rains went after Mesa during cross-examination, saying her testimony - including her assertion that she and Grant had not gone to a party earlier in the night - didn't match independent evidence.

He displayed a log of calls from her phone to Grant's early that New Year's Day. The log showed two calls, one at 2:05 a.m. and the other at 2:09 a.m. - two minutes before Mehserle shot Grant. Mesa said she remembered one call.

Mesa had been on the Dublin-Pleasanton train with Grant, but had exited at Fruitvale and had gone downstairs before trying to call Grant, she told jurors. She said she had tried to call Grant several times but that he had picked up only once.

She soon heard a gunshot, then saw Grant being loaded into an ambulance, she said.

Mesa also said Grant had told her several times on previous occasions that he never wanted to be shocked with a Taser again - this after a 2006 incident in which San Leandro police chased him and shocked him to subdue him.

A point seized upon

Rains seized on the detail. Did Grant tell you, he asked, that he had been shocked only after fleeing and disobeying police orders?

"No," Mesa responded.

After Rains asked the question three different ways - more pointedly each time - Judge Robert Perry cut him off.

The prosecution also called witnesses to the shooting, including three women who were riding BART together that night as they returned home from San Francisco.

Each said she had seen no resistance before the shooting, either by Grant or his friends. And they expressed disgust at the shooting and at what they called the aggressive approach of BART officers in detaining the young men.

Anthony Pirone, the former BART officer who detained Grant and made the decision to arrest him, was "very angry, very hostile and very mean," said Pamela Caneva. She said Pirone at one point asked Grant, "You f-ing taking a picture of me?"

When he was shot, "It didn't seem like Grant was doing anything except laying there," said Caneva's friend, Lydia Clay.

However, Caneva also said Mehserle struggled to handcuff Grant.

"I thought, he must be strong," Caneva said of Grant.