- Trial began Friday for Jesse Taggart, charged with shooting a driver during a Provo Black Lives Matter protest in 2020.
- Prosecutors say Taggart's actions that day were criminal and planned.
- Taggart's attorneys say he believed fellow protesters were in danger and tried to defend them.
PROVO — It has been more than five years since the Black Lives Matter protest in Provo, but Jesse Taggart appeared in a Provo courtroom Friday for the first day of his trial on charges including attempted murder.
Taggart is accused of crimes related to three different interactions on the June 29, 2020, protest with individuals who were in cars and found themselves in the middle of the protest while driving elsewhere. He is charged with shooting and injuring one motorist.
Deputy Utah County attorney Meghann Mills called peaceful protest an "amazing opportunity" and a "cornerstone of our American democracy" during her opening statements, but said violence and intimidation are not protected forms of protest.
"Passion, no matter how deeply we feel it, is never an excuse to use violence," she told jurors.
Mills said this case is not about politics or about the merits of either side of the protest that day — that Black lives or blue lives matter — but about Taggart's conduct and intentions. And she said evidence from his messages and a conversation with someone else at the protest will show that Taggart had a plan of using the idea of defending others to justify his actions. Giving one example, she said Taggart bragged about shooting the driver, saying, "One Nazi down."
Ultimately, she said Taggart committed crimes and "was not protecting" other protesters during three separate interactions in the hour after 8:20 p.m.
In the first instance, she said a person who pointed a gun at the head of a man who was bringing a soda to his wife at work was wearing a mask and was not identified, but Taggart was standing next to that person. Mills said the man was driving with his 5-year-old son and a dog in the vehicle as he tried to move slowly into an intersection with a green light, but protesters began striking his car, causing over $3,000 in damage.
The man testified Friday about his worries that he would be shot or his son would be hit. He said the event had an effect on both of them, saying his son was asking later if those people would come and find them.
In the second instance, which led to the most serious charge, Mills said Taggart fired two shots at a man who was driving his car to Home Depot for a plumbing project. The man, Ken Dudley, testified he was on the phone with his mom and had sat for a while and did not want to be involved in the nearby protest. He recalled seeing a burning police car during an earlier Salt Lake protest that turned violent. Dudley decided to turn right on Center Street from University Avenue to go where there were fewer people, but as he pulled forward, "they just swarmed my vehicle," he said.
He testified that someone ran into his car, then flopped on the ground, and another man right by him had hopped onto the sideboards. That's when he was shot.
Dudley said his elbow was shattered and he was bleeding, so he went from feeling nervous to panicked.
"I was afraid for my life," he said.
He recalled a woman running from across the street and jumping in front of his car as he was trying to drive away, and that's when he said he was shot a second time. That bullet went through his headrest and into his steering wheel and led to shrapnel damaging his abdomen and eye.
At that point, he testified that he thought he would bleed to death if he did not get to a hospital, so he kept moving forward and waiting for people to get out of the way.
In the third instance, Mills said Taggart hit his gun against the car window of a woman who later thought she had been shot when another person broke a window to her car.
"The aggressor in these situations were not the drivers of these vehicles," the prosecutor said.
Taggart is charged with attempted aggravated murder, a first-degree felony; felony discharge of a firearm, a second-degree felony; plus aggravated assault and riot, third-degree felonies.
Mills said for the most part, prosecutors and the defense agree about what happened, which is shown in multiple videos, but they disagree about the motives.
"Mr. Taggart wants you to believe that he's a hero who was forced to make a split-second decision," she told jurors, but said the evidence shows otherwise.
Defense attorney Camille Aagard told the jury its task is "so simple," they just need to determine that Taggart believed somebody was about to die. She said this belief was not based on anger or politics but on what he saw.
She showed a brief clip of the interaction with Dudley and said that although there are many videos of the incident with different perspectives, Taggart only had one. He could see over the grill of the SUV that protesters were there, and he believed that they would be hit.
Aagard said some people believe that if demonstrators are in the street, anything goes and people can still drive their vehicles, but that is not what the law says.
She said Taggart had routinely gone to Black Lives Matter protests in Salt Lake City, where police were there diverting traffic. But that did not happen in Provo, where drivers did not always wait and police were not out to direct them around or through the protesting crowds. She said, however, that that intersection was still functioning with cars stopping until people waved them through, until one car pulled up with a loud sound, which she said created "an immediate threat."
"The situation escalated really quickly and temperatures rose really fast," she said.
