Standing in front of a car that had just led him and eight fellow cops on a chase up and down Interstate 95, Boynton Beach police officer Patrick Monteith said he kept his rifle trained on the passenger, watching his hands to make sure he wasn’t reaching for a gun.

If the passenger, identified as Jeffrey Braswell, showed any sign he was going for a weapon, "I would have killed him," Monteith matter-of-factly told a federal jury on Tuesday. Peering into the car, Monteith said he quickly concluded Braswell posed no threat.

"He was blocking blows from the officers on the right side of the vehicle who were trying to get him out," Monteith said. Stepping closer, Monteith said he realized why the 28-year-old Boynton Beach man wasn’t getting out of the car. He couldn’t.

"Take off the (expletive) seat belt," Monteith said he told the officers who were pummeling Braswell and violently shoving him back and forth.

Monteith’s damning account of the August 2014 arrest — testimony that he acknowledged made him uncomfortable to offer — came on the first day of a trial of three of his once-fellow officers who are accused of violating Braswell’s constitutional rights during the chase that ended on South A Street in Lake Worth.The three also are charged with fabricating reports to cover up their misdeeds. If convicted, they could spend as long as 20 years in prison.

Of the three, only officer Michael Brown still works for the agency, although he is on paid leave. The two others, Justin Harris and Ronald Ryan, have since left the department. Harris resigned about two years ago to open a gym. Ryan was fired in 2016 after higher-ups deemed him unfit for duty.

In opening statements, attorneys representing the three men dismissed the charges as little more than "Monday morning quarterbacking" by federal prosecutors and FBI agents.

With years to review the officers’ actions, it’s easy for agents and prosecutors to second-guess decisions the cops had to make in a split-second in a chaotic situation, said attorney Bruce Reinhart, who represents Brown. Attorneys Jonathan Wasserman and M. Caroline McCrae, who represent former officers Harris and Ryan, respectively, agreed.

"Police work is tough. Police work is stressful," said Wasserman. "Police work is important. Police work is dangerous."

However, both Boynton Beach Police Chief Jeffrey Katz and Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Sgt. Michael Musto testified police also have to follow rules.

Both testified that they came to the same conclusion about the officers’ actions after reviewing a videotape Musto shot from a PBSO helicopter as he was helping the Boynton officers with the arrest. The officers’ conduct, both said, "looked bad."

Further, Katz said, the video didn’t jibe with the officers’ accounts. In their reports, none of the roughly nine officers involved in the arrest said they hit or kicked Braswell, car driver Byron Harris or Ashley Hill, another passenger in the car.

Unable to reconcile what the video showed and what Brown, Harris, Ryan and other officers wrote in their reports, Katz said he asked both the FBI and the Palm Beach County State Attorney’s Office to investigate.

Quickly taken over by the FBI, the investigation initially seemed to focus on how officers’ dealt with Harris, whose bruised and bloodied face was widely publicized after the incident. However, when the indictment was handed up in June, it focused solely on the three officers who dealt with Braswell. Sgt. Philip Antico was also indicted. Accused of helping his three subordinates fabricate their reports, Antico will be tried separately.

Musto testified that he turned over the videotape to his supervisors because he was concerned about what it showed. "It looks bad to a normal person or to the media — the kicking, the punching, that kind of stuff," the pilot, who supervises the sheriff’s aviation unit, told the jury.

However, under questioning by McCrae, Musto acknowledged that the actions he described involved officers who were dealing with what appears to have been Byron Harris, not Braswell. The focus of the infared camera on board the chopper shifted away as the officers dealt with Braswell.

Further, all three defense attorneys said it was unfair to claim that their clients intentionally fabricated their reports. All three had a long, grueling, stressful night, they said.

They were on edge after chasing the car from Gateway Boulevard in Boynton Beach to Okeechobee Boulevard in West Palm Beach and back to Lake Worth, the attorneys said.

At the start of the chase that began at about 2 a.m., a bag containing white powder, presumably drugs, was thrown from the car, a signal they were dealing with dangerous drug dealers, Reinhart told jurors. Before the car got on the highway, it clipped officer Jeffery Williams, who was putting out stop sticks in hopes of keeping the car off I-95. A police cruiser following the suspects then ran over Williams, leaving him critically injured, he said.

By the time the officers returned to the station at about 5 a.m., they were exhausted, their attorneys said. The officers weren’t thinking straight. The lapses in the reports were simple omissions, they said.

"You can’t be guilty of crimes because you made a mistake," Reinhart said. "You have to have intent."

Further, the attorneys pointed out, the officers checked boxes on "use-of-force" forms, indicating they had hit or punched Braswell.

Still, Katz said, that isn’t enough. The officers should have detailed what they did in their reports not just checked boxes on the use-of-force forms, that are only used for record-keeping purposes.

While all three later amended their reports, Assistant U.S. Attorney Susan Osborne said they did so only to cover their tracks after learning of the PBSO video, she said. "This video depicts a beatdown," she said.

The trial, which is expected to wrap up next week, continues Wednesday.