The trial started about two weeks ago, and the jury of nine men and three women will soon decide if they believe Scarsella acted in self-defense. There are no African-Americans on the jury.
The prosecutor said Scarsella and his friends went to the protest to cause trouble and that he had “an obsession with shooting black people” as well as “a deep core of racial hatred.”
In the closing arguments for the defense, the attorney said nothing should matter in the jury’s decision outside of the night of the shooting and the events directly leading up to the shooting.
The defense argued that an angry crowd kept punching and pursuing Scarsella and his friend and that Scarsella shot several times because he feared for his life.
The jury is slated to start deliberating Wednesday morning.
In one message, Hennepin County prosecutors say, the 23-year-old asked a friend to join him at target practice "for when we have to shoot black guys."
>When he discussed buying a new gun — the one he would eventually use on the night in question — he complained that another firearm he owned "was not killing brown people dead enough."
"Once again you are texting about using a [gun] to kill black people?" Hawley asked.
"That's what we were talking about, yeah."
When Hawley asked if his texts were "just words," Scarsella said yes and that they didn't mean anything to him.
"So you can bandy around saying the N-word and it doesn't mean anything to you?" Hawley asked.
"I believe in freedom of speech," he responded.
He also said he was "ignorant" about the issues people of color face.
"I think that led me to the texts I sent," he said.
He described other texts as jokes "not meant to be taken seriously."