The man wore little expression and an orange-and-white jumpsuit Monday as he sat in the Calhoun County courtroom.
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| Joshua Russell |
On the screen, a video played. It showed Anniston investigators interviewing Russell exactly two months ago -– the day Officer Justin Sollohub was fatally shot in the forehead.
The video was entered as evidence Monday in the preliminary hearing for Russell, who is charged with capital murder in Sollohub’s death.
“I had the gun up like this,” Russell told Investigator Chris Sparks on the video.
In the courtroom, the defendant did not blink as he watched the on-screen version of himself struggle against his handcuffs, stand up and demonstrate how he held the gun before allegedly shooting Sollohub.
“I ain’t shot nobody before,” Russell said on the video.
Probable cause
The video of Russell’s Aug. 24 interviews with Anniston police was a key part of prosecutors’ evidence during the two-hour hearing, which ended with District Judge Mannon Bankson finding probable cause in Russell’s capital murder case.
The hearing also has helped to fill in some of the details about what transpired between Sollohub and Russell before the officer’s death through the video and testimony from an Anniston investigator and a woman who witnessed the shooting.
Until now, police had publicly provided this account of events: Sometime around 11 a.m. Aug. 24, Sollohub got out of his patrol car to talk to Russell, who was walking down an Anniston street. A brief foot chase followed and, when Sollohub rounded the corner of a nearby house, Russell shot him, Anniston police Capt. Richard Smith told The Star in August.
Details about why Sollohub stopped to speak to Russell, why Russell ran and what prompted Russell to shoot the 27-year-old went unanswered until the Monday hearing.
Russell’s account of events
In the 50-minute video –- recorded the same day as Sollohub’s fatal injury and soon after an eight-hour manhunt that ended in Russell’s capture –- the 25-year-old defendant described several times his interactions with Sollohub that morning.
He told Sparks and Investigator Tim Suits that Sollohub stopped to question him about the whereabouts of another Anniston resident. Then, Sollohub went back to his car for a moment before returning to where Russell stood.
The officer requested to search Russell, the defendant said in the video interview. Russell decided to run, he said on tape, because he was carrying a gun and marijuana and knew he had outstanding warrants.
“He shouldn’t have been (expletive removed) chasing me, man,” the video showed Russell saying voluntarily before any of the officers had begun to ask him questions or read him his Miranda rights. “I don’t even know how I feel right now. I don’t. I really don’t.”
Once police read Russell his rights, the video showed Sparks and Suits beginning to ask him questions about what happened to Sollohub.
His account of events changed a couple of times in the course of his interview at the Anniston Police Department, but throughout the video, Russell was consistent in pointing out that he fired the gun at Sollohub.
Karen Mason, the woman who lived at the Walnut Avenue home where Sollohub was shot, said she and her 18-year-old son also saw Russell pull the trigger.
District Attorney Brian McVeigh, lead prosecutor in the case, asked Mason if she had any doubt whether the jump-suit-clad Russell who sat only a few feet away from her in the courtroom was the officer’s shooter.
“No, no doubt,” Mason said.
What witnesses saw
Mason said she and her son were in their backyard when they saw Russell running through a neighbor’s yard.
Before Russell made it to Mason’s property, he stopped to take a quick puff of the cigarette he was carrying before tamping it out, she testified.
Mason said she recognized Russell from seeing him around the neighborhood but didn’t know his name.
“He proceeded to run around the left side of my house,” Mason recalled during her Monday testimony. She said an officer –- Sollohub -– appeared in her yard soon after that and approached the back left corner of her house, where she said Russell was hiding.
Sollohub turned the corner of the house once but then “backed up” into the yard where Mason said she was standing.
Sollohub “goes back around the corner,” Mason remembered, holding up his hands. She held up her hands around her head to demonstrate for the court. Jeniffer and Byron Morris, Sollohub’s mother and stepfather, sat quietly in the gallery front row. Byron Morris kept an arm around his wife’s shoulders throughout Mason’s testimony.
“That’s when he shot him,” Mason continued. “My son runs to 18th and Moore to direct the officers to where the officer is laying, and I scream at my mom to call 911.”
What investigators discovered
Suits, the lead investigator in the capital murder case, testified after Mason; he was only three blocks away when the “officer down” call came across the radio.
He rushed to the scene, where he stayed with Sollohub until the paramedics came.
Suits testified that he observed a single bullet wound on Sollohub’s forehead. The investigator noted Sollohub’s gun, Taser and pepper spray were still stored in their holsters on his belt.
Anniston police took statements from Mason and her son, both of whom identified Russell as the suspect out of photo lineups set up at the department the same day as the shooting.
John Robbins, Russell’s court-appointed Birmingham attorney, made a point to note it took Mason two tries before she identified his client in the lineups.
After identifying Russell as the suspect, police continued their efforts to keep the area near Mason’s home blocked off as they searched for Russell, Suits said.
He testified that, with the help of “hundreds of officers” from various law-enforcement agencies, police found Russell hiding in a field near the intersection of 19th Street and McCoy Avenue.
After his capture and the videotaped interview with Anniston investigators, Suits first charged Russell with attempted murder.
That charge was later upgraded to capital murder, when doctors officially pronounced Sollohub dead at UAB Hospital in Birmingham on Aug. 25.
‘I was just going to scare him’
Both the defense and the prosecution agreed Monday that a gunshot wound caused Sollohub’s death, despite the fact the state Department of Forensic Sciences has yet to return the official autopsy report.
Robbins entered a “not guilty” plea on behalf of his client at the beginning of the hearing. But after finding probable cause, Bankson sent Russell back to jail with no bond as he awaits a jury trial in Calhoun County Circuit Court.
The testimonies of both Mason and Suits indicate Sollohub did not draw a weapon or act aggressively toward Russell. But the video shows Russell emphasizing he hadn’t meant to kill Sollohub.
“I was just going to scare him,” Russell said on video, describing how he saw someone in Constantine Homes scare off a police officer once by holding a cellphone like it was a gun and pointing it in the officer’s direction. “It just all happened.”
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