Accused murderer Jodi Arias told an Arizona jury today that her ex-boyfriend became enraged when she dropped his new camera, body slammed her to a tile floor and threatened to kill her, and in the frantic struggle that followed she remembers a gun being fired accidentally but does not remember stabbing him.
Her version of Travis Alexander's death was the culmination of more than a week of testimony in which Arias, 32, has tried to convince the jury she killed Alexander, 27, in self-defense during a violent episode in what she has described as an increasingly abusive relationship. She is on trial for murder and could face the death penalty if convicted.
Arias said that Alexander lost his temper when she dropped his camera on his bathroom floor while taking nude photos of him. Enraged, he picked her up and body slammed her onto the floor, screaming at her, she told the jury.
She said she ran to his closet to get away from him, and then exited through the closet's second door into Alexander's office where she grabbed a gun that she knew he kept on a top shelf. She could hear Alexander's footsteps coming after her down the hall, she said.
She tried to keep running, but as Alexander came after her she said she pointed the gun at him in an attempt to ward him off.
"I pointed it at him with both of my hands. I thought that would stop him, but he just kept running. He got like a linebacker. He got low and grabbed my waist, and as he was lunging at me the gun went off. I didn't mean to shoot. I didn't even think I was holding the trigger," she said.
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"But he lunged at me and we fell really hard toward the tile wall, so at this point I didn't even know if he had been shot. I didn't see anything different. We were struggling, wrestling, he's a wrestler.
"So he's grabbing at my clothes and I got up, and he's screaming angry, and after I broke away from him. He said 'f***ing kill you bitch,'" she testified.
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Timeline of the Jodi Arias Trial
Asked by her lawyer whether she was convinced Alexander intended to kill her, Arias answered, "For sure. He'd almost killed me once before and now he's saying he was going to." Arias had earlier testified that Alexander had once choked her.
But Arias' story of the death struggle ended there when she told the court that she has no memory of stabbing or slashing Alexander whose body was later found with 27 stab wounds, a slit throat and two bullets in his head. She said she only remembered standing in the bathroom, dropping the knife on the tile floor, realizing the "horror" of what had happened, and screaming.
"I have no memory of stabbing him," she said. "There's a huge gap. I don't know if I blacked out or what, but there's a huge gap. The most clear memory I have after that point is driving in the desert."
Arias' defense rests heavily on the description of Alexander's death, as her attorneys have argued she was forced to kill Alexander in self-defense. She has described what she said were Alexander's increasingly abusive and rage-filled outbursts toward her in the weeks leading up his death.
The prosecution alleges that Arias murdered Alexander in a jealous rage, and has attempted to prove that the killing was pre-meditated. They will cross-examine Arias after she is done testifying for the defense.
Arias said that she remembers driving away from Alexander's home in Mesa, Ariz., and "coming to" somewhere in the desert to realize that her lover was likely dead, and that she had killed him. As it dawned on her that police would soon be looking for Alexander's killer, she said she decided that she would pretend the bloody confrontation had never happened.
"I knew that it was really bad, that my life was probably done now. I wished it was just a nightmare I could wake up from, but I knew I had messed up pretty badly and the inevitable was going to be something I could not really run from," she testified.
"I didn't want anyone to know that that had happened or that I did it, so I started taking steps in the aftermath to cover it up. I did a whole bunch of things to try to make it seem like I was never there," she said.
Arias Can't Remember Gory Death of Ex-Boyfriend
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Arias Can't Remember Gory Death of Ex-Boyfriend
