By Doug Fletcher,Staff Writer

AUBURN – Shawn Fitzsimmons would have turned 26 on Sunday. Instead of a birthday party, his family will gather at the cemetery where he’s buried.

It’ll be an opportunity for closure. They ought to be able to tell him how things have turned out.

One of those things is the manslaughter trial of one of Fitzsimmons’ best friends, Brandon Knight.

Knight, 20, is charged with killing Fitzsimmons. The state claims he acted with recklessness or criminal negligence when he squeezed the trigger on a 9-mm Llama semiautomatic pistol sometime after 2 in the morning on Sept. 11, 2004. That action sent a bullet through Fitzsimmons’ skull.

The trial opened Monday morning in Androscoggin County Superior Court. Under questioning by prosecutor Fern LaRochelle, an assistant attorney general, and Justin Leary, Knight’s defense lawyer, a series of witnesses told jurors what happened at the time of the shooting and leading up to it.

And nearly all of the witnesses – local and state police as well as two friends of Knight’s and Fitzsimmons’ – spoke about Knight’s remorse immediately after the shot was fired.

“I didn’t mean it; I didn’t know it was loaded,” Lewiston police Sgt. David St. Pierre said Knight was saying when he got to the Horton Street apartment where the shooting happened.

Aryne Brown, the woman who rented the apartment and who owned the pistol, said she had taken it from a drawer earlier that night to show to Knight after he asked about it.

She said she had first removed the clip holding bullets, and worked the slide action twice to make sure the gun was unloaded.

Later, after Knight dry-fired the weapon once, she said she took it back and returned it to the drawer in her bedroom where it was kept. She replaced the clip without telling anyone.

Brown told jurors that it was the first time that Knight had ever handled the pistol.

As the evening progressed, the friends listened to music and watched movies while visiting at her apartment. She had had a drink, and a few beers were consumed, but it wasn’t a night of heavy drinking, Brown said.

Toxicology tests showed that Fitzsimmons had not consumed any drugs or alcohol. Testimony from witnesses stated that Knight also had avoided alcohol that night.

Shortly before the shooting, Brown testified that she was growing tired and went to her bedroom looking for pajamas to get ready for bed.

Knight followed her into the room, she said.

While her back was turned, he took the gun from the drawer and headed back into the living room where Fitzsimmons was seated on a couch and another friend, Joe Chase of Sabattus, was walking into the kitchen toward the bathroom.

Brown said she turned to start to follow Knight from the room when she heard the gunshot.

“I actually thought for a second that he had shot himself,” she said of Knight. “Then he started freaking out and said he had shot Shawn.”

Chase said his memory of many of the events of that night and early morning was foggy, but that he remembered turning to see his buddy slump on the couch. He said he went to Fitzsimmons to check his pulse, that he took the gun from Knight and then he called 911 to report the incident.

He sat next to Fitzsimmons attempting to stem the flow of blood from his friend’s head while waiting for medics and police to arrive.

Now, Chase works on Fitzsimmons’ car, a Mitsubishi Eclipse, that his friend’s parents, Danny and Lisa Fitzsimmons, gave him after the shooting tragedy.

“He’s redoing it,” said Lisa Fitzsimmons after the trial recessed Monday. Chase is making the payments, and keeping the car going as a tribute to his friend.

Shawn Fitzsimmons’ life was cut short just as he was about to start a new career. The Lewiston High School graduate had attended Elmira College in New York and had bounced around in a variety of jobs, his folks said of their only child, but he was gearing up for a new job at Lowe’s.

He was like a lot of guys his age: Someone who enjoyed music – rock, rap and hip-hop – and cars.

But he also had an artistic side to him. He wrote poetry, for example, and was working on a screenplay, which his parents say they still haven’t been able to bring themselves to read.

“He was a good kid,” said Danny. So good, added Lisa, that more than 200 people attended his funeral service.

Now they’re looking forward to the trial being brought to a conclusion, and getting ready to remember their son on his birthday, come Sunday.

“It’s been a very rough year,” said Lisa Fitzsimmons.

The trial resumes at 9 a.m. today in Superior Court. Jurors are expected to get the case late today or on Wednesday morning.