He has pleaded not guilty.
Roeder’s defense team did not address the jury in an opening statement, but would probably do so later in the trial, which is expected to take two weeks.
Church members were gathering in the fellowship hall the morning of May 31, with Tiller scheduled to serve as an usher, Sedgwick County District Attorney Nola Foulston told the jury of eight men and six women.
“Then unexpectedly, a sound was heard, like a popping of a balloon,’’ she said.
Kathy Wegner tearfully described how moments after she greeted Tiller as he came into church she heard a popping sound and saw him “just fall flat on his back.’’
On her call to 911, she told the dispatcher the shooter was about 6 feet tall, balding, and was wearing a white shirt.
Prosecutors also displayed a graphic photo of Tiller, showing him on the ground wearing a green business suit and cowboy boots.
Blood covered most of his face and pooled under his head.
Tiller’s wife, Jeanne, placed her head into her hands and covered her eyes as a police officer testified about photographs taken at the scene.
Officer Valerie Shirkey testified that Tiller was “laying [in] a pool of blood’’ and that a doctor who had been trying to help Tiller was also “covered in blood.’’
Before opening statements began, District Judge Warren Wilbert denied a defense motion to move the trial out of Wichita and a motion from prosecutors to not allow defense lawyers to seek a lesser charge of voluntary manslaughter.
Wilbert has repeatedly said the trial will not turn into a debate over abortion, warning Roeder’s lawyers that he intends to keep the case as a “criminal, first-degree murder trial.’’
But the judge galvanized both sides of the abortion battle when he refused, on the eve of jury selection, to block the defense from trying to build a case for a conviction on the lesser charge of voluntary manslaughter.
They want to argue that Roeder believed Tiller’s killing was necessary to save unborn children.
