Boston - Relatives of the policeman shot dead after the Boston bombings gave harrowing testimony on Wednesday as the defence downplayed a new video of convicted killer Dzhokhar Tsarnaev flipping his middle finger.
The 21-year-old former university student will be sentenced either to death, or to life in prison without parole, by a jury after the second phase of his trial, now under way.
Sean Collier, 27, was campus police officer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the most prestigious universities in the country, when the Tsarnaev brothers shot him dead on the night of April 18, 2013.
“It's been a terrible two years,” step father Joseph Rogers, 58, told court. He married Collier's mother more than 20 years ago, and the blended family grew up together, six children in all.
One woman on the jury cried as Rogers told of the phone call announcing that Sean had been shot and the rush to the hospital.
“All the children showed up,” he said. Rogers and his wife saw Sean's bloodied body in a hospital room.
“He had a hole in the middle of the head, he was shot to pieces.”
Tsarnaev, dressed in a brown blazer and white shirt, refused to look at Rogers, maintaining the impervious expression that he has adopted since his federal trial began in early March.
“There is somebody missing. Thanksgiving and Christmas will never be the same,” said Rogers.
“It is still a huge loss for me and my family for the rest of our lives,” Sean's younger brother Andrew Collier told the court.
Tsarnaev was convicted on April 8 on all 30 counts related to the April 15, 2013 Boston Marathon bombings, Collier's murder, a carjacking and a shootout while he was on the run.
The killer of part Chechen descent who moved to America with his family aged eight took US nationality a year before carrying out the bombings, which killed three and wounded 264 more.
Prosecutors have told court that Tsarnaev was “America's worst nightmare” who deserves to die for perpetrating one of the bloodiest attacks on US soil since the September 11, 2001 terror strikes.
The released a screen grab of Tsarnaev, dressed in an orange prison jumpsuit flipping his middle finger at a surveillance camera in a cell before his first arraignment.
“This is Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, unconcerned, unrepentant and unchanged,” said Assistant US Attorney Nadine Pellegrini on Tuesday.
The defence went on the counter-attack, showing a video clip that showed Tsarnaev pacing in his cell, approaching the camera and appearing to fix his hair as he stares into the camera.
For a moment he then flashes the V for victory sign, and then sticks up his middle finger for the briefest of seconds.
He waited in the cell that day four hours, said Marshal Gary Oliveria on the witness stand.
Under cross-examination from defence lawyer Miriam Conrad he admitted writing a report on the finger flashing three days later at the request of superiors.
Tsarnaev watched the video without noticeable reaction.
Among the other witnesses called by prosecutors, was Adrianne Haslet-Davis, 34, a ballroom dancer amputated below the knee.
At times breaking down uncontrollably, she recalled the smoke, the screams and the suffering of the 2013 bombings.
“I thought that it was it, I thought I was going to die,” she said.
The sentencing phase, which began Tuesday, could last up to four weeks.
Prosecutors will try to convince the 12 jurors that there are enough aggravating factors - including premeditation, the number of victims and a lack of remorse - to warrant capital punishment.
defence attorneys will follow the prosecution in calling witnesses, possibly early next week.
They will call for life without parole, portraying Tsarnaev as a confused 19-year-old, frightened of his more radical, older brother.
Tamerlan, 26, was shot dead by police while the pair were on the run.
Jurors were selected in part for their openness to imposing the death penalty, controversial in a state that has executed no one since 1947.
A poll carried out by CNN found that just over half of Americans, 53 percent, said Tsarnaev should get the death penalty.
AFP