photo by: Mugshot courtesy of the Shawnee County Sheriff's Office

Elijah Joseph Garcia is pictured with the Douglas County Judicial and Law enforcement Center.

A Douglas County jury on Monday watched a 7-second video of a man slamming a handgun into the side of another man’s head and the gun instantly — and loudly — discharging.

The pistol’s firing at such close range left burn marks on the man’s face, his former girlfriend told the jurors.

That violent act, however, was just the final of many violent acts perpetrated by the defendant that night, she testified.

According to the woman, Elijah J. Garcia had previously initiated an attack as the three drove back to Lawrence — with a 5- or 6-year-old in the car — after attending an Oktoberfest event in Topeka on Sept. 21, 2024.

The woman, who had been sitting in the front passenger seat of her Chevy Equinox as her boyfriend drove, recalled that Garcia, who was sitting in back with the boyfriend’s child, was intoxicated and began picking at her — “being hateful” and refusing to “cut it out” when asked. The incident then went from verbal to physical abuse, she said, with Garcia hitting the driver, and then her, multiple times in the face with his fist and a handgun.

“I was screaming,” the woman testified, and so was the child sitting next to Garcia. “It was loud and chaotic,” and the car was careening back and forth, seemingly hitting the guardrail on the road.

At one point Garcia was grabbing the steering wheel from the driver’s grip, the woman said. At another, his whole torso was thrust across the front console, his arms waving in a frenzy, she said. At another point Garcia fired the gun inside the car — at least once, she recalled, although she later found multiple bullet holes in her vehicle. She said she was trying to keep the gun in Garcia’s hand directed upward and away from people in the car.

She testified that she ordered Garcia out of the car, even reaching back to open his door while recording with her phone, but that her boyfriend never stopped to let him out on the highway. Whether the highway was Interstate 70 or another route between Topeka and Lawrence she couldn’t say, not being familiar with the area, and she also admitted that she didn’t clearly recall everything that happened during the evening’s commotion.

When her boyfriend pulled up to Garcia’s home in Lawrence, she said the boyfriend also got out of the car — in order to retrieve a phone he thought Garcia had taken — and the two men argued briefly in the yard before Garcia forcefully struck the boyfriend on the head with “another gun,” causing it to discharge.

The woman is heard on the video, which she took, saying that she had recorded the incident and would call the police.

The pair then drove to the boyfriend’s rural residence, striking another car and possibly some mailboxes along the way, and contacted police.

Jurors saw photos of their faces and blood-stained clothes taken that night. The woman had a gash on the side of her nose that required two to three stitches. And she also had a fractured cheekbone and long-lasting numbness in her mouth, she said, along with thousands of dollars of damage to her car. Her boyfriend had bruises and cuts on his face and “was covered in blood,” she said.

Garcia’s defense attorney, Razmi Tahirkheli, told jurors in his opening argument that they would hear “a lot of miraculous things” that, under scrutiny, wouldn’t make any sense. He said that the videos they would see were a “setup” to produce “shock and awe,” and he argued that the gun belonged to the boyfriend, not to Garcia, who he said simply took it from the boyfriend.

The woman testified later that she never saw her boyfriend with a gun that night, although he was generally “into” guns like the people he hung out with.

The now ex-boyfriend is apparently not going to testify, which prompted some incredulous and heated words from Tahirkheli toward prosecutor Cody Allen Smith during a break, outside the jury’s hearing. Tahirkheli loudly said it was inappropriate for Smith to bring two charges where the boyfriend was the alleged victim because he isn’t going to testify. Smith said little audibly in reply.

Tahirkheli later renewed that line of thought in Judge Stacey Donovan’s presence when he said that on Tuesday he would be asking for the two charges to be dismissed. Donovan told him that he better “bring some research” if he hoped to convince her because it’s not, as he had suggested, unheard of for charges to be brought without victim testimony.

The Journal-World reported on Garcia’s preliminary hearing more than a year ago. At the end of that hearing, Donovan ordered Garcia to stand trial on an amended complaint that includes two counts of aggravated battery, two counts of aggravated assault, one count of aggravated endangering of a child and one count of criminal damage to property, all felonies.

Garcia is out of custody on a $25,000 cash or surety bond. He has previous convictions in 2022 for DUI and possessing a firearm while under the influence. He is also facing new charges, filed in the spring of 2025, of aggravated battery and possession of cocaine.

His trial will resume Tuesday morning before a jury of five men and seven women. The jury does not have an alternate because one of the men selected for the jury claimed almost immediately after being selected that he had a sick grandparent. Donovan told the remaining 12 that she hoped none of them became ill in the next four days — the expected duration of the trial.