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.

Updated at 3:15 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 5

A man accused of beating and pistol-whipping people in a car and again on his front lawn was found not guilty Thursday of all six felony charges, including aggravated battery, in Douglas County District Court.

The jury of five men and seven women returned the verdicts after deliberating for just over three hours in the case of Elijah J. Garcia, of Lawrence, whose trial began on Monday. Afterward, Garcia and his mother hugged defense attorney Razmi Tahirkheli and thanked him for his work on the case.

“Let’s get out of here,” Garcia then said as he exited the courtroom.

Tahirkheli said, “See you tomorrow,” presumably a reference to Garcia’s pretrial conference Friday for a different trial he is facing this month in the very same courtroom on charges of aggravated battery and cocaine possession.

In this week’s trial, Garcia was accused of initiating an attack on a woman and her boyfriend as the three drove back to Lawrence — with a 5-year-old in the car — from an Oktoberfest event in Topeka on Sept. 21, 2024.

During the trial, the jury heard testimony from the female passenger in the car and from Garcia himself, and saw a video of a gun being slammed into the side of the driver’s head and loudly discharging.

Garcia testified on Wednesday that he had been acting in self-defense after the driver and female passenger attacked him while he innocently sat in the backseat of the vehicle with the driver’s child. It was also self-defense, he said, when, back in Lawrence, he went into his home, retrieved a Glock handgun and went back outside to strike the man in the head with it.

In his closing argument, prosecutor Cody Allen Smith was adamant that the evidence indicated anything but self-defense, pointing to multiple photos of the couple’s injured faces — the woman had a fractured cheekbone and required stitches — and their blood-stained clothing. He also pointed to videos showing Garcia with two different handguns in his possession, one of which he reportedly used to strike both alleged victims in the car and one of which he used to hit the man in the head on the lawn, causing the gun to discharge.

The jury, however, evidently believed that Smith had not proved a single one of the six charges beyond a reasonable doubt — not two counts of aggravated battery with a deadly weapon, not two counts of aggravated assault, not one count of aggravated endangering of a child and not one count of criminal damage to the woman’s Chevy Equinox.

Tahirkheli, Garcia’s attorney, in his own closing argument, focused on the fact that the alleged male victim was not produced to testify at the trial — the state said it could not find him — and that the absence amounted to “a violation” of Garcia’s Sixth Amendment right to confront his accuser. Tahirkheli also told the jurors that the man would have had a different story to tell at trial — one that would have been beneficial to his client.

Tahirkheli also asked why the couple would have confronted Garcia at his house after they had dropped him off.

“Why follow someone who was hurting you?” he said, arguing that Garcia had a right to defend himself in his front yard without a duty to retreat.

“There’s no way you can find him guilty of anything,” he told the jurors.

A little over three hours later, they agreed with that assessment.

Garcia 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. A trial for those charges is set to begin on Feb. 18 before the same judge.