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 man accused of violently beating and pistol-whipping people in a car and again on his front lawn testified Wednesday that he was actually the victim, not the aggressor, on a September night in 2024 as the group returned to Lawrence from an Oktoberfest event in Topeka.

Elijah J. Garcia, of Lawrence, told a Douglas County jury that he had simply been acting in self-defense after the driver and the driver’s girlfriend attacked him as he innocently sat in the backseat of the moving vehicle next to the driver’s 5-year-old boy. The driver, he said, even pulled a gun and turned around to point it at him in the backseat while driving “very fast” and as the woman hit Garcia and “gouged” his eyes.

Garcia’s account differed markedly from the account given earlier at his trial by the female passenger, who said that an intoxicated Garcia started personally insulting her, comparing her negatively to the driver’s previous girlfriend, leading to an argument that quickly escalated into Garcia repeatedly punching the couple in the front seat and firing a handgun inside the Chevy Equinox while the child sat frightened in the backseat.

The jury earlier in the week saw photos of the couple with blood-stained clothes and injured faces — the woman’s cheekbone was fractured and her nose required two stitches, an emergency room doctor testified. The woman said the injuries resulted from Garcia wildly beating them with his fists and a pistol. The jury also saw a video, recorded by the woman on Garcia’s lawn, of Garcia smacking the driver in the head with a Glock handgun and the pistol instantaneously firing near the man’s face — an act that Garcia also described not as aggression but as self-defense.

Garcia — on trial for six felonies, including aggravated battery — sought to portray the couple as unreliable drug users and suggested that the man, who he said was armed, had engaged in a drive-by shooting in Topeka that same night. Garcia said that he had intended to stay with friends in Topeka but went back to Lawrence with the couple after they said they had left drugs at his house and feared they might be found by a friend there who was watching Garcia’s dogs.

“For most of the ride things were normal,” Garcia testified, but he was upset that drugs had been left at his house “without my knowledge.”

He conveyed his dismay to the driver and asked him to not drive so fast, he said, but he got “backlash” for that and the argument “escalated pretty quickly.”

He said the dispute became physical after the couple in front began “verbally attacking” him and he told them that he didn’t want to talk anymore.

“Next thing I know, I had a firearm in my face,” he said. As he pushed the gun away from him, it went off, he said, but he wrested control of the pistol as the woman kept scratching and hitting him.

The woman had testified that amid the chaos she had reached back, opened Garcia’s door and told him to get out of her car, but Garcia told the jury that the door they saw in a split-second video was ajar because he had opened it himself and “was prepared to jump out.”

The driver, he and the woman both agreed, never stopped the car despite all the commotion.

When the car eventually turned onto his street, Brush Creek Drive, Garcia said he did finally jump out and run to his house. There he saw the man who had been watching his dogs, and he handed him the gun “that they just tried to kill me with.”

Garcia said he then grabbed a different gun — a tan Glock pistol — from inside his house while the angry driver screamed for him to come back outside. Garcia said he told the man to leave, but then he went outside with his pistol, and a brief argument about the previous gun ensued.

“Then I hit him,” Garcia said, describing his take on the video seen by the jury in which the gun fired on impact with the man’s head. Garcia said he knew the man to carry weapons and that he was on “my property” refusing to leave.

On cross-examination by prosecutor Cody Allen Smith, Garcia denied — despite their blood-stained clothing — that he had hit anyone in the car or that he had grabbed the steering wheel or had thrust himself into the front seat to attack the couple.

Police arrested Garcia at his home that night.

The driver did not testify, and much of the trial was taken up by motions and hearsay objections related to his absence. In the end, Judge Stacey Donovan denied Tahirkheli’s request to dismiss charges related to the man and his request to admit into evidence the man’s interview with police, as well as Tahirkheli’s requests for a mistrial and a directed verdict. The state did, however, amend its complaint to reduce the aggravated battery charge related to the man from a Level 4 felony to a less serious Level 7 felony.

Closing arguments are expected Thursday morning, after which the jury of five men and seven women will begin deliberating.

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 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.