AUBURN – Melissa Mendoza threatened to kill herself and Daniel Roberts with a gun in his garage about a month before he shot and killed her in the same garage, he told police detectives shortly after her death.

Roberts was interviewed for about three hours after he fatally shot Mendoza on Aug. 15, 2005. During the early morning interview, he said Mendoza was bipolar and suicidal.

“She went into the garage. She grabbed the gun. I locked the door so she wouldn’t come back in and shoot me and the baby,” Roberts told Maine State Police detectives.

Roberts said he later went out to the garage and confronted her about the suicide threat.

“She goes, ‘No.’ She said, ‘I’m going to shoot you,'” Roberts told police in the taped interview played to jurors Tuesday in Androscoggin County Superior Court.

Roberts, 37, of Sabattus is on trial, charged with the murder of Mendoza, 29, of California.

Prosecutors called State Police Detective Jennifer King to the stand on the seventh day of the trial. King was one of several investigators who quizzed Roberts about his actions the morning he shot Mendoza in the back of the head at close range.

Jurors were given lengthy transcripts to follow along to a recording played on courtroom speakers.

In the interview, Roberts said he responded to her earlier threat: “I go, ‘Melissa. Come on. ‘This ain’t the way it should go down,’ and I talked her out of it.”

She later denied she had the gun, he told the detectives, claiming that Roberts had it instead.

The weekend before the shooting, Mendoza stayed at Roberts’ house with the nanny of the couple’s 2-year-old, Savanna Marie.

Roberts said Mendoza knew from her earlier threat where Roberts kept the gun. He had forgotten to take that gun with him when he vacated his home that weekend, leaving it instead between his stacked blue jeans in his bedroom closet.

When he arrived back home at the end of the weekend, he noticed money and the gun missing. He made a note of it in writing.

He said he should have called police about it, but didn’t.

“It’s gone. I assume she has it,” he said.

She called him about 1 a.m., he said. She said she wanted to talk.

“I thought it was awful, awful strange,” he said.

He invited her over and unlocked the garage door. He heard her drive up. He met her at the door. It was dark and raining outside. The lights in the garage were off.

“I know the garage really well,” he explained, preferring the dark.

Mendoza opened the door and turned to the left to switch the light on. Roberts closed the door behind her.

As she turned back from the light switch, he noticed his .38-caliber revolver in her right hand. She held a green handbag with her left hand.

“I said, ‘What the (expletive) are you doing?’ She said, ‘Dan, I’m going to kill you and I’m going to kill the baby.'”

She didn’t know he had tucked a gun into his back pocket, he said. He had known his other gun was missing and remembered she had threatened to kill him before, he said. He didn’t trust her.

She repeated the threat. He protested. She said, “I don’t give a (expletive.)

She was drunk, he said.

“She took one step and I shot her. I didn’t know what else to do,” he said. “I shot her and then she went down.”

Because Mendoza had moved toward the door that leads to the house instead of shooting him, he figured she wanted him to watch her kill Savanna, he said.

“I saw her eyes. I saw the gun and there was no talking. I knew at that point what was going on.”

She was near the garage door she had just entered. He was behind her. The muzzle of his revolver was one or two feet from the back of her head when he fired, he said.

He thought he called 911, but had actually dialed 411. So he hung up. The baby started crying, so he called his father, Charles, to come to the house and pick up the baby.

“She can’t see none of this,” he said.

After calling 911, a police dispatcher told him to check Mendoza’s pulse, but in the middle of his call with them, “I lost her pulse,” he said.

A Sabattus police officer arrived at the scene. Roberts went into the house then came back out to the garage. The officer had moved the gun Mendoza had dropped from its original position, he said.

When he questioned the officer about it, she didn’t answer. She was busy calling an ambulance, he said.

“I didn’t like that she moved the gun,” he said.

Roberts told the detectives he didn’t grab Mendoza from behind because he thought she would just shoot him.

“I was scared to death,” he said. “This is self-defense on her, me and a third party.”

Justice Joyce Wheeler told jurors to skip court today due to the impending snowstorm. The trial is expected to resume Thursday.