SAN ANTONIO – A jury deliberated for several hours Friday before being sent home for the weekend in the trial of a man charged in a fatal Martin Luther King Jr. Day shooting.
OL Wallace, 19, is accused of the Jan. 17, 2022, shooting outside Santa’s Place on the East Side that claimed the life of Johnnie Mobley, 61, and injured four others.
“I’m sure when he said ‘I have a dream,’ this is not what he had in mind,” Bexar County Assistant District Attorney Raul Jordan told jurors in closing arguments. “I can’t even imagine what must have been going through Johnny Mobley’s mind that night.”
During the four-day trial, prosecutors told the jury there were multiple shooters but that Wallace was the first to start shooting.
Several witnesses who testified in the trial identified Wallace as the first shooter.
In closing arguments, defense attorney John Young said that Wallace only fired his gun after someone attacked him first and was acting in self-defense.
”Obviously, OL Wallace, Jr. was not the only person firing a gun that day. He was firing a gun, he did fire a gun. But he’s not the only one,” defense attorney John Young said in closing arguments.
On Thursday, Wallace testified in his own defense and told a different version of events than what he told police in an interrogation video.
Wallace told the jury that he went to the party to get some money from his father.
The defendant testified that he noticed a man he didn’t know standing against a wall with a gun. Moments later, the man suddenly started shooting at him.
“I fired back and got behind a pillar,” Wallace said. “I was shooting at him directly at the wall.”
Wallace said after emptying his gun clip, he ran from the scene and even later tried to sell the gun but got rid of it instead.
In the video, Wallace told police that he just started shooting when he heard gunshots fired at him and ran through a parking lot, shooting blindly.
Another differing detail is what he did with the gun, which he said during his interrogation that he threw the gun in a yard as he ran away.
Jurors deliberated for seven hours before the judge sent them home. They will resume deliberations on Monday.
If Wallace is found guilty, he faces a punishment of 5 to 99 years or life in prison.