QuickTake:

A man shot by Eugene police after he called 911 said he was holding a gun because he was trying to keep it from a friend who was acting violently. An attorney representing the city said two officers who fired at him have a different version of events.

This story has been corrected to say that Edgar T. Rodriguez told jurors he sustained a shooting wound in his left shoulder.

A man shot by Eugene police after calling 911 took the witness stand Monday, Sept. 22, telling jurors he held a gun at the time an officer spotted him because he wanted to keep the weapon away from an intoxicated friend behaving violently.

Edgar T. Rodriguez testified on the first day of a civil trial alleging excessive force, negligence and battery in connection with a 2016 shooting outside his west Eugene apartment.

Rodriguez, now 36, called 911 a few minutes before 1 a.m. on Sept. 10, 2016, when he realized he could not control the physical fighting between a former housemate and the man’s girlfriend, both of whom he had agreed to host despite not knowing the woman and not having seen the man in some three years, he said.

He told jurors he was shot en route to placing the gun in his car for safekeeping, not realizing when hit by the first of several bullets that a police officer had fired at him.

“Gun!” Rodriguez said. “That’s it. That’s all I heard, ‘Gun!’”

He told jurors he had been holding the gun by its barrel and immediately threw it several feet away from where he stood near his apartment door. 

But during opening statements in the trial in U.S. District Court in Eugene, an attorney for the city said two police officers named in the lawsuit “had a totally different version of events.”

The Lane County District Attorney found the use of deadly force justified by the two officers who fired at Rodriguez, according to published reports from 2016. An Oregon State Police investigator in 2016 said Rodriguez was pointing the gun down at a 45-degree angle before starting to raise it at an approaching police officer, according to published reports.

“It’s really a 10-second period that matters,” Ben Miller, an assistant city attorney for Eugene, told jurors on Monday as part of an opening statement.

But Miller also told jurors that Rodriguez failed to behave responsibly on the night he was shot.

“This case is about alcohol-fueled bad decisions,” Miller said.

Miller said Rodriguez never told an emergency dispatcher he had a gun, playing for jurors 911 audio recordings.

Willow Hillman, an attorney for Rodriguez, in an opening statement told jurors the amount of time from when a police officer yelled at Rodriguez to drop his gun to when he began firing was “less than a second.”

Jurors later heard audio from a police dashcam of the shooting, but Miller said there was no body-worn camera footage of the shooting. Body cameras became a requirement for Eugene police officers in 2017, according to published reports.

The gun Rodriguez held on the night he was shot was a .50 caliber Desert Eagle pistol, which he said he considered a “novelty.”

Rodriguez, an Army veteran who said he was deployed to a combat zone in Iraq in 2009, told jurors he continues to experience pain and also mental distress from being shot multiple times in 2016.

“It feels like I’m having a heart attack sometimes,” Rodriguez said, adding that he’s had to make some 10 emergency visits to a hospital since the shooting. In addition, he’s lost motion in his left shoulder because of a shooting wound, among other physical injuries.

Mentally, “it feels like living the same day over and over,” Rodriguez told jurors. “It’s existential dread sometimes.”

The lawsuit names two officers, Timothy Hunt and Mark Hubbard, as defendants, as well as the city of Eugene for “maintaining policies or customs exhibiting deliberate indifference to the constitutional rights of people to whom their employees would interact with and respond to,” according to court documents.

The complaint filed in 2018 also names as a defendant Faith McCready, a dispatcher who answered Rodriguez’ call to 911.

The trial, which continues Tuesday with city of Eugene attorneys cross-examining Rodriguez, began Monday with jury selection. Senior U.S. District Court Judge Ann Aiken said she expects the trial to end by Oct. 1.