AUBURN – Melissa Mendoza planned to kill her 2-year-old daughter then the toddler’s father – in that order – because she didn’t know he was armed, Daniel Roberts said in a videotaped court hearing 11 days after Mendoza was shot dead.

Mendoza, Roberts’ ex-girlfriend, had stayed at his Sabattus home for a visit with their child, Savanna Marie, during the weekend before he shot her, Roberts testified in 8th District Court on Aug. 26, 2005.

On Thursday, prosecutors at Roberts’ murder trial played the tape of the earlier court proceeding for the jury during the eighth day of presenting their case against him in Androscoggin County Superior Court.

After Mendoza, 29, of California left his home that weekend, Roberts, 37, said he returned and noticed one of his guns was missing from its hiding place between folded blue jeans on his bedroom closet shelf. He thought Mendoza had taken his silver-colored gun.

So he took the precaution of removing his other gun, a black revolver, from his safe and put it on a dining room hutch that evening.

Later that night, he invited Mendoza over to talk after she had called him repeatedly. He went to the hutch and slipped the gun into the back pocket of the blue jeans he was wearing and walked out into the adjoining garage.

“I had a loaded gun in my back pocket with no intention of using it whatsoever,” he said in the videotaped testimony.

He was barechested and barefoot, waiting in the dark garage.

Mendoza arrived and walked through the garage door. She was drunk, he said.

“She was only violent when she drank,” Roberts testified.

He greeted her: “Hi, Mama. How are you?”

She told him she was going to shoot Savanna, then Roberts.

“Her intent was to shoot the baby and then come back and shoot you?” a woman questioning Roberts asked. “Does that sound reasonable?”

Roberts said he believed it when he saw the gun in her hand. “She didn’t know about the gun I had,” Roberts said.

Mendoza took a step in the direction of the door that leads into the house.

“I think that night she just lost it,” Roberts said, attempting to explain her behavior.

Roberts said he tried to stop her. “No, Mama. No, no, Mama.”

Then he shot her, he said, rather than confronting her physically.

“I thought if I grabbed her she would shoot me right there,” he said.

Asked why he left a loaded gun in the house where he knew Mendoza would be staying, Roberts said: “I totally forgot about that gun. … It just slipped my mind.”

Deputy Attorney General William Stokes noted that Mendoza told police a week before her fatal shooting that she couldn’t describe Roberts’ two guns. She also wrote in protection from abuse documents that she didn’t know where Roberts kept his guns.

She claimed Roberts had once put a gun to her head, but he denied it ever happened. He said she had been suicidal and had gotten one of his guns. He later talked her out of it, he said.

During cross-examination, State Police Detective Jennifer King, who interviewed Roberts the morning he shot Mendoza, said Roberts told her his biggest fear was that Mendoza would take Savanna to Mexico, explaining that she spoke Spanish and had family there. Mendoza had earlier taken Savanna back to California at a time when Roberts had custody of the girl.

King also said Roberts never told her that he picked up Mendoza’s cell phone after he shot her, in contrast to his testimony in the videotaped hearing.

Prosecutors are expected to rest their case this week. Defense lawyers said they expect their case to take about a week.