Two people who were the targets of a December shooting at the Boardwalk Apartments, 524 Frontier Road, began testifying Wednesday at the preliminary hearing for the man accused of pulling the trigger.

Randy J. Johnson, 19, has been in Douglas County Jail on four charges of attempted second-degree murder since the Dec. 21 incident.

Jennifer Cooper, 22, and Shelley Bartlett, 21, were two of four people on an apartment’s second-floor balcony when a man they each identified in court as Johnson opened fire on them. At the hearing, Cooper and Bartlett delivered similar accounts of a verbal spat that degenerated into the shooting.

Cooper told the court she walked onto the balcony outside her apartment around 11:20 p.m. to confront a man and woman in the parking lot below who were making noise. Cooper said the woman began threatening her and the man started spitting at her.

Then, Cooper said, the woman got into a car and the man raised his hand toward her.

“I thought he was going to flip me off — no big deal — but then I see two flashes coming at my face,” Cooper said.

She told the court that upon seeing the gunfire she thought “I may never see my daughter again.”

Cooper said that at the time of the shooting, Johnson was wearing a belt with a buckle in the shape of a marijuana leaf. Prosecutor Trent Krug later submitted a belt matching that description into evidence.

Cooper also told the court that immediately after the shooting, she confronted the resident of the apartment the shooter had come from. The resident, Cooper said, denied knowing the man intimately, but said he went by the name “Mississippi.” Johnson told the judge at his initial court appearance that he had moved to Lawrence from Mississippi about a month before the shooting to care for a sick uncle.

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The court also began to hear testimony from Bartlett, 21, a Baldwin woman shot twice in the leg during the incident.

Bartlett also described the argument between Cooper and the couple in the parking lot. Bartlett said that she had come out to the balcony with her boyfriend and his sister to tell the couple in the parking lot that the police had been called about the noise.

She said that after seeing three flashes from a gun, she didn’t remember anything until finding herself on the couch in her apartment bleeding from the leg.

Judge Michael Malone recessed the hearing at noon. Bartlett will continue her testimony Monday morning when the proceedings resume.