By Doug Fletcher,Staff Writer

AUBURN – Jurors in the Brandon Knight manslaughter case deliberated for three and a half hours Tuesday without reaching a verdict.

Before the seven women and five men started weighing evidence at Androscoggin County Superior Court, Knight took the witness stand to testify in his own behalf.

“I wish this never would have happened,” he told the jury.

The state maintains that Knight, 20, acted recklessly or with criminal negligence when he squeezed the trigger of a 9-mm Llama semiautomatic pistol shortly after 2 a.m. on Sept. 11, 2004. The single round killed one of Knight’s best friends, 24-year-old Shawn Fitzsimmons.

Knight’s lawyer, Justin Leary, questioned him about events leading up to the shooting. Knight said that he and Fitzsimmons, with Joe Chase and Aryne Brown, were hanging out that night at Brown’s Lewiston apartment.

At one point Brown spoke of her gun and Knight asked to see it. He said she showed him how to work the slide of the weapon to cock it, and he later dry-fired it before Brown took it back and returned it to her bedroom.

Brown testified Monday that after Knight returned the gun to her, she reinstalled a clip loaded with six bullets without telling Knight or the other men that she had done so.

Knight told jurors that he hadn’t handled a gun since he was 7 or 8 years old. Dry-firing Brown’s pistol, he said, “was cool.”

Later, he said he followed Brown into her bedroom. There, he spotted the Llama in a dresser drawer. While Brown was preoccupied, he took the gun out, pulled back the slide as Brown had shown him, and walked into the living room.

“I told Shawn, Hey, look at this,'” Knight said, and pulled the trigger.

“I thought the gun was not loaded,” he told the jury. He said Brown had told him she didn’t keep the gun loaded.

Earlier, a state police firearms expert testified that the gun was in good working order, but also noted that “the average person looking down (through the ejection opening on the slide) wouldn’t see the bullet tip” if one had been in the chamber.

The expert, Joseph Gallant, also said that someone inexperienced with firearms might not notice that the clip had been put into the weapon’s handle.

Under cross-examination by Assistant Attorney General Fernand LaRochelle, Knight said he couldn’t recall ever having been told not to point a gun at anyone, loaded or not.

Defense lawyer Leary asked Knight why he had cooperated with police after being told of his rights. He had made statements and re-enacted the events of the morning.

“I wanted to help them. I wanted to know how it all happened,” Knight said.

In closing arguments after testimony ended, Leary told jurors, “Brandon made a mistake. This is so tragic, so sad.”

But the state hadn’t fulfilled its burden to prove guilt of criminal recklessness or criminal negligence beyond a reasonable doubt, he said.

“He did not think the gun was loaded. He did not consciously disregard the risk,” Leary argued.

LaRochelle, however, scoffed at the suggestion that Knight had made a mistake. He knew what he was doing when he took the gun out of the drawer, when he pulled back the slide to cock the weapon, when he walked into the living room and when he pulled the trigger.

“His mistake was not checking to see if there were any bullets in the gun – that was the mistake,” the prosecutor said.

“A gun is made to kill. He was playing with a deadly weapon,” LaRochelle added.

Jurors will resume their work at 9 this morning. A guilty verdict could result in a prison term of up to 30 years.

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