AUBURN – Melissa Mendoza was a “runaway freight train” when she pointed Daniel Roberts’ gun at him and told him she was going to kill him, their 2-year-old daughter, then herself, Roberts’ attorney told a jury Tuesday.

She never did.

Instead, it was Roberts who shot and killed Mendoza, defending himself and their toddler, Savanna Marie Roberts, who was asleep in her bed, attorney Leonard Sharon said.

Mendoza was drunk – a 0.18 percent blood-alcohol level – and high on Valium when she came to Roberts’ Sabattus home shortly after 1:17 a.m. Aug. 15, 2005, Sharon said. Mendoza was angry that she couldn’t control her ex-lover, and she had spiraled into enraged despair.

After the shooting, police failed to gather crime-scene evidence that would have helped prove Roberts’ depiction of events, Sharon told jurors, calling it a “missing crime scene.”

Sharon delivered a 70-minute statement that opened his client’s trial, which is expected to last up to three weeks.

By contrast, Deputy Attorney General William Stokes spent just 23 minutes explaining how Mendoza, 29, feared Roberts, 37, after the windshield of her rented car was smashed and the tires slashed on the car belonging to the people with whom she stayed. She also was angry that Roberts had accused her of stealing money from his home.

She unwisely paid him a visit that morning to confront him and check on the welfare of their child, Stokes said. She took only two steps into his garage when she was shot in the back of the head by his .38-caliber revolver as he stood behind the door.

Nine women and seven men, including four alternates, were picked Tuesday morning to serve as the jury. They will decide whether Roberts committed murder, acting “intentionally or knowingly” when he killed Mendoza, or whether he acted in self-defense.

Before lunch, jurors were shuttled from Androscoggin County Superior Court to the garage at 81 Roberts Road in Sabattus to view the scene of the shooting. Reporters were not allowed beyond the entrance to the long driveway.

Justice Joyce Wheeler told the jurors, before they left the courthouse, that court officers would point out certain objects at the site. But jurors wouldn’t be allowed to ask questions or confer with each other during the viewing, she said.

Back in the courtroom, Stokes told the jury that Mendoza and Roberts were locked in a “bitter and contentious custody battle” following a failed romantic relationship. One lived in Maine, the other in California. He painted a picture of a woman, harassed and intimidated, who just wanted her daughter to be safe.

Shortly before she was killed, Mendoza had taken Savanna back to California, where Mendoza’s other daughter and son lived. According to a court-approved agreement, Roberts was to have custody at that time. Roberts tracked down his daughter in California and brought her back to Maine. A Lewiston District Court judge later ordered Mendoza’s visits be supervised.

Sharon said Mendoza was seeking to control Roberts, using Savanna as leverage. Mendoza went from “lovesick” to “heartbroken” to “humiliated” to “enraged,” Sharon said.

The weekend before she was killed, she stayed at Roberts’ home with Savanna’s nanny serving as monitor.

Sharon said it was then that Mendoza must have stolen a gun from Roberts’ bedroom and used it to threaten him and Savanna.

Items from Roberts’ home were found in bags in the trunk of her rented car, proving that she had stolen from him, Sharon said.

Mendoza was “out of control” the night before she was shot, Sharon said. She called Roberts 43 times between 7 p.m. and the time she came to his home less than six hours later.

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