OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) - An Oklahoma pharmacist sentenced to life in prison for fatally shooting a teenager who tried to rob his store wants an appellate court to reconsider his appeal, saying he had post-traumatic stress disorder and now remembers new details, according to court documents filed Wednesday.
Jerome Ersland, 62, was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole for the 2009 shooting death of a 16-year-old Antwun Parker during an attempted robbery. The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed the conviction and sentence in 2013.
Ersland claims in the new documents filed in Oklahoma County District Court that he only recently remembered certain details of the incident due to PTSD. He now claims a second gun was in his pocket, not in a drawer, and that he believed he was being shot at when a fellow employee slipped and kicked a trash can.
“After my conviction and appeal, I was confronted by my new defense counsel regarding findings from a recreation of the robbery conducted by him, which evidence explained my perceptions at the time of the robbery and shooting,” Ersland wrote in an affidavit. “When confronted with this evidence vindicating my beliefs, under subsequent intense questioning I recalled many details of the incident that I had not previously remembered.”
The prosecutor’s office did not return a call seeking comment Wednesday.
Prosecutors concluded Ersland was justified when he shot Parker in the head, knocking him to the ground during the May 19, 2009, robbery attempt at the Reliable Pharmacy in a run-down neighborhood in south Oklahoma City. Ersland then chased a second would-be robber out of the store before grabbing a second handgun and shooting Parker, who was unconscious, five more times in the abdomen. Prosecutors said the additional shots went too far, and a coroner’s report found that the latter shots killed Parker.
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