photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

The Douglas County Judicial and Law Enforcement Center is pictured on Sept. 4, 2024.

A Douglas County jury on Tuesday took under an hour to acquit a man of aggravated battery after he was accused of attacking another man last winter and gouging his eyes.

The man, Hector Seeger, 21, took the stand Tuesday morning and admitted that he had “poked” the other man’s eyes after the two left a Lawrence bar on March 7, but he told the jury that he did it in self-defense after the other man called him a racial slur and jumped him. He said the only way he could get free of the man’s chokehold, which was impeding his breathing, was to reach over his shoulder and poke the man’s eyes until he loosened his grip.

“I was distraught,” Seeger testified, saying that he had never been in a fight before and feared for his life. After he got free from the man he said he frantically ran to his apartment.

Seeger, of Overland Park, was a KU student at the time. His accuser, 20 at the time, was another college student who told the jury on Monday that Seeger had followed him out of Bullwinkle’s bar and attacked him — gouging his eyes until they bled and tackling him — for reasons unknown to him.

However, Seeger swore that it was the other way around. The accuser, whom he knew from high school and who had “bullied” him in their younger days with racial “rhetoric,” had followed him out of the bar and attacked him as they were walking north along Tennessee Street, he said.

Seeger told jurors that he is Mexican and had immigrated to the United States when he was 3 years old. The accuser and he both attended Blue Valley West High School, where Seeger said the accuser called him an “illegal alien,” used racial slurs, taunted him at lunch and made cruel references to him in front of others about needing a “green card.”

In his opening argument Tuesday, defense attorney Hatem Chahine listed three or four slurs for Mexicans and told the jury that the accuser had used slurs so “vile” that he would not himself repeat them but would let the defendant share them. On the stand, Seeger recited the same slurs that Chahine had mentioned but added the F-word before one of them — the one he said the man called him the night of the attack. The defendant also said that during poker games in college the accuser would refer to him as “the cartel” if he won a hand.

The jury on Monday saw photos of the accuser’s swollen and bloodshot eyes and heard how he had suffered an abrasion on the cornea. On Tuesday they saw photos that Seeger had taken of his own injuries, including scraped knees and injured hands, as well as a mark on his neck that he said came from his necklace being pulled taut against his throat as he was in the chokehold.

Seeger said he never reported the incident to police because the accuser had told him the day after the incident that he was going to report it, which he eventually did 19 days later. Seeger said he apologized to the man for poking his eyes, explained why he did it and offered to peacefully work things out, but he said he was rebuffed.

Prosecutor Devin Canfield, in his closing argument, insisted that the case was not about race nor things that may or may not have happened in high school but about an unprovoked attack on a man’s eyes, “one of the most vulnerable parts of the body.” Chahine, in his own closing, dramatically yelled the racial slur at the jury, insisting that it had preceded the violent attack on his client, who had simply reacted in self-defense.

Under Kansas law, a person can use physical force when and to the extent he reasonably believes such force is necessary to defend himself against the other person’s imminent use of unlawful force.

Tuesday’s acquittal was at least the fifth for the Douglas County District Attorney’s Office in four months. On Sept. 5, a jury found a young man not guilty of aggravated criminal sodomy against two teens. On Aug. 8, a jury found a KU student not guilty of rape and aggravated criminal sodomy. On July 31, a jury acquitted a man who was accused of an aggravated assault with an ax near a homeless camp on the Kansas River levee trail; and on July 10, a jury found that the state had not proved its case against a convicted drug dealer who was accused in a Lawrence teen’s fentanyl death.