Shorts' memory, however, had failed him earlier in the investigation when he identified someone else as one of the men he had seen; police later eliminated that man as a suspect.
The second prosecution witness was David Rosemond, the car burglar who had originally tipped the detectives to Gantt and Smith. Rosemond testified that he was stealing car stereos when he saw Gantt punching Vardhan and Smith, standing nearby, possibly holding a pistol. He said he recognized them from skid row. Rosemond said he later approached the victim to see what he could steal. He said he took an ATM card near the body but later threw it away.
Police, who initially suspected a car burglar might have been responsible for the slaying, first heard Rosemond's story when they confronted him about the killing. Rosemond told jurors he thought police initially believed he was the killer.
"They kept saying, 'Yeah, well, you'd better tell us who or you're going to get charged with it,' " he testified.
Rosemond was hardly an ideal witness. A homeless crack cocaine addict, he had spent most of the previous seven years in and out of prison for petty thefts, mostly stealing car stereos.
District attorney's records show he was diagnosed in prison with chronic schizophrenia and a brain disorder that can impair a person's ability to think and process information.
Defense attorneys accused Rosemond of lying and suggested he could be the killer.
But Sterling Norris, then a deputy district attorney, said it was too fanciful to believe that the defendants were victims of mistaken identity and that Gantt coincidentally had a matchbook from an Indian restaurant.
"The deceased happens to be of Indian ancestry. Now is this guy unlucky or is he not?" Norris said to jurors.
Norris, a celebrated prosecutor who had convicted serial killer William Bonin a decade earlier, urged the jury to compare the numbers from the matchbook with the numbers written by Vardhan.
Defense attorney Donald Calabria accused the prosecutor of using the matchbook as a form of racial profiling. The victim was a nonsmoker, and authorities had found no one who had seen him with the matchbook or been able to connect him to the restaurant. Furthermore, the phone number belonged to a man in Bangladesh -- not India -- who told police he did not know the victim.
"They've gone so far that it is really, really scary," Calabria told jurors.
