The trial of a North Bergen man accused of shooting his ex-girlfriend to death on her wedding day two years ago opened last week in Bergen County Superior Court in Hackensack.
Agustin Garcia, 49, has been charged with the fatal shooting of Gladys Ricart in her Ridgefield home as she posed for pictures in her wedding dress, approximately three hours before she was set to marry another man on Sept. 26, 1999.
Opening testimony was heard in the trial beginning last Tuesday. The trial is expected to last for three to five weeks and will feature as evidence the actual videotape of Ricart being photographed before her wedding, then being gruesomely gunned down.
In fact, the defense team hired by Garcia, a prominent businessman and member of the Dominican-American community, will not try to hide the fact that their client did in fact shoot Ricart.
But they are using as a defense "passion provocation," claiming that Garcia and Ricart were still romantically involved at the time of the shooting and that Garcia only became enraged and angered when he found out that Ricart was indeed marrying another man.
The jury will decide whether Garcia is guilty of murder, which is what the state’s attorneys will try to prove, or Garcia is guilty of the lesser charge of manslaughter.
There is a substantial difference. If found guilty of murder, Garcia could be sentenced to 30 years to life, with no parole until 30 years have passed. A manslaughter conviction carries a 10-year sentence.
For passion provocation to work as a defense, attorney Edward Jerejian must prove that Garcia was provoked sufficiently to cause a loss of self-control, and that he did not have time to cool off between the provocation and the killing.
Jerejian used the same defense to get a murder acquittal in a celebrated case in Hackensack in 1995.
The prosecutors, on the other hand, are trying to show that Garcia committed his act due to long-simmering jealousy and not a sudden rage.
Garcia and Ricart, 39, had a stormy on-again, off-again romance for almost seven years. No one is certain when the couple actually broke up. Defense attorneys Raymond Colon and Fernando Oliver claim that they have a videotape showing the couple together at a North Bergen grocery store about 14 hours before the killing.
The defense also claims that the video from the grocery store is sufficient evidence that Garcia thought their relationship was ongoing. Garcia’s lawyers say the sight of Ricart in a wedding dress upset him, so he impulsively reached for his pistol and killed her.
The prosecution team, headed by Bergen County First Assistant Prosecutor Fred Schwanwede, claims that Garcia knew Ricart was seeing another man long before he drove to her house with a gun.
The case has drawn a host of attention nationwide, including daily coverage from Court TV. The attention caused Superior Court Judge William C. Meehan to impose a gag order, barring the lawyers from both sides to comment on the case with the media.
It has also led to severe scrutiny within the hallowed halls of the Bergen County Courthouse.
Obviously, the most damning piece of evidence is the videotape of the wedding, which was taken by the professional photographer hired by Ricart to film the ceremony.
Pre-trial hearings were held last March to determine whether to allow the video to be used in the general trial. The video was shown last week. It clearly shows Garcia rushing inside the Ricart home in Ridgefield, then shooting Ricart to death with a revolver that he pulled from a briefcase.
The video clearly shows Garcia’s hand on the pistol. Then it shows Ricart’s brother, Juan, trying to wrestle with Garcia over the gun.
Juan Ricart was the first witness to testify on Tuesday. He vividly described his sister’s final few minutes.
"When he first shot, I tried to stop him, but he moved away and kept shooting," Ricart told the jurors. "He fired five shots, and three hit my sister. He emptied the gun and then looked like he wanted to reload. I grabbed the gun and stopped him from closing it. We wrestled inside the house, all the way to the kitchen, where we fell. To me, it seemed like years, because I was calling for help the whole time."
Ridgefield police eventually wrestled the gun away from Garcia.
When Juan Ricart pointed at Garcia, telling jurors that he was the man who shot his sister, the defendant just looked away. Ricart became emotional when he was shown a picture of his sister in her wedding gown.
Because many of Ricart’s relatives were witnesses to the shooting and appear on the list of 131 possible witnesses to testify, they were barred from the courtroom during Juan Ricart’s testimony.
Defendant Garcia had approximately 20 family members in attendance for support.
Garcia remained stoic throughout the first day. He was spotted wiping his eyes twice, but it was not known if he was wiping away tears. He remains held in Bergen County jail on $1.5 million bail.
In opening remarks to the jury, Schwanede said that Garcia was obsessed with Ricart.
"This is a case about a man who just couldn’t let go," Schwanwede said. "He couldn’t accept the fact that Gladys was no longer his, so he wasn’t going to let anyone else have her."
In their opening remarks, the defense team said that they admitted Garcia pulled the trigger, but they asked the jury to consider his mental stability at the time of the shooting.
Attorney Oliver claimed that Juan Ricart and Gladys’ son Davis attacked Garcia physically when he tried to enter the house.
"He was fearful, disoriented and confused," Oliver said. "He takes out the gun in fear and the rest is history. He lost control of himself and his emotions when he was provoked. He’s sorry this happened, because he failed Gladys."
The trial continued after press time on Thursday.