Darrell Brooks’ trial was never going to be easy for the Milwaukee suburb of Waukesha. Now it could hurt even more.
Brooks plowed through the city’s Christmas parade in his Ford Escape last year, killing six people and injuring dozens more, prosecutors allege. His trial opens Monday with jury selection and is expected to last at least a month.
Prosecutors have lined up hundreds of videos of the incident and dozens of eyewitnesses to testify, promising a case that legal experts have called overwhelming. But Brooks changed the playing field last week when Judge Jennifer Dorow ruled he could represent himself.
Brooks, who has no legal training, has already shown himself to be disruptive and combative. What looked like a straightforward proceeding could quickly devolve into a painful slog for still-grieving witnesses, legal observers said.
“It’s really going to be a challenging trial for the witnesses,” said Tom Grieve, a criminal defense attorney based in Madison. “You have a defendant who feels like he has nothing to lose. He’s going to try to make as big a mess as possible and force a fumble by the prosecutors or judge and try to force a mistrial or build an appeal.”
According to a criminal complaint, Brooks, 40, got into an argument with his ex-girlfriend on Nov. 21, then sped off and drove onto the parade route despite police shouting at him to stop and shooting at him. Police officers described the SUV as moving side to side and running over people.
The dead included 8-year-old Jackson Sparks, who was marching in the parade with his baseball team, and four members of a group calling itself the Dancing Grannies, a group of grandmothers who dance in parades. Police captured Brooks after he abandoned the SUV and tried to get into a nearby house, the complaint said.
Brooks faces 77 charges, including six counts of first-degree intentional homicide and 61 counts of felony reckless endangerment. Each homicide count carries a mandatory life sentence. Prosecutors attached a using-a-dangerous-weapon penalty modifier to each endangerment count, bringing the total maximum sentence on each of those charges to 17 1/2 years.
District Attorney Susan Opper has compiled more than 300 videos of the parade. Her witness list is 32 pages long; it includes Sparks’ parents, as well as dozens of police officers and FBI agents.
“There’s going to be no question in this jury’s mind what happened, who was driving, how these people were injured or killed,” Opper told the judge in court last week.
The process won’t assuage any of the grief that David Durand is suffering over the loss of his wife, Tamara, one of the Dancing Grannies who was killed.
“The trial isn’t going to bring her back,” he said.