If she was going to die at work, bank teller Phalon Montgomery Austin wanted her killer to look her in the eye when he pulled the trigger, she told a Pulaski County jury on Tuesday.
Testifying at the robbery trial of 30-year-old Stephen Joel Frazer, Austin, 33, was describing how she refused to break eye contact with the hoodie-wearing man who had just handed her a note demanding $10,000 at the Bank of the Ozarks branch at Markham Street and Rodney Parham Road in Little Rock.
The outline of something the man held in his pocket made her believe he was pointing a gun at her, she testified, saying she otherwise never saw a weapon.
"I don't think it was a finger. It was bigger than somebody's finger," Austin told the 10 women and two men on the jury. "I thought, if this is what he's going to do, he's going to have to look at me while he's doing it."
Prosecutors Leigh Patterson and Ashley Bowen said the November 2013 holdup was the first of four armed robberies that Frazer would pull within a week across west Little Rock and into the Heights -- three of them at banks and one at a drugstore.
On trial for the next two days, the Maumelle man, a former bank manager, is charged with four counts each of aggravated robbery and theft, charges that could lead to a life sentence. Proceedings before Circuit Judge Leon Johnson are scheduled to resume at 10:30 a.m. today.
Cautioning jurors that Frazer would be making his mental health an issue, Bowen told jurors that someone truly mentally ill can't control their compulsions and doesn't know the difference between right and wrong. But that's not the Frazer they will come to know this week, she said.
"[Insanity] must be a true defense and not an excuse to commit crimes," Bowen said, telling jurors that substance abuse is not a legal defense to criminal activity either.
She told jurors they'll see that Frazer was a "busy man" that week in November 2013, working so hard that on one day, he robbed two banks in less than an hour before noon, the Summit Bank on North Rodney Parham Road then the First Security Bank on Kavanaugh Boulevard.
The Frazer that jurors will see at trial is a man who used his knowledge about bank security to commit his crimes calmly and quietly, Bowen said. Frazer always took his demand notes with him, always asked for just enough money to keep from activating alarms and warned tellers not to slip him any tracking devices or marked money, she said.
Defense attorney Bill James didn't dispute Frazer was the man who stole the money from banks and a load of prescription medications from the Walgreens on Cantrell Road.
But he told the jury that prosecutors couldn't prove Frazer robbed anyone.
His client made no threats, showed no weapons and was polite to the people he took money from, James said. The case, at best, is theft, the attorney said.
Frazer was also pretty much out of his mind because of the crippling depression that also had trapped him in prescription-medication addiction, the attorney said.
How else to explain a robber who didn't cover his face and didn't carry a weapon, one who surrenders the same day his name and likeness are broadcast on the TV news, James asked, predicting that Frazer likely would testify so he could tell jurors his story directly.
James called on the jury to see what authorities wouldn't see, that what prosecutors call robberies were really just a "long, slow suicide attempt" by a man "who wasn't thinking."
When Frazer was arrested, he was a man at the end of a yearlong decline brought on by the pressure of caring for his comatose father, painful teeth problems and a recent relapse into drug abuse, the attorney told jurors.
"He thought this was going to end in suicide," James said, likening Frazer's arrest to an episode of the Cops TV show. "There's a lot more to this case than just the surface. They're not worried about what's going on underneath. They [police] made their bust. They didn't care."
Questioning the bank teller Tuesday, defense attorney Bobby Digby II emphasized how nonthreatening Frazer had been, asking Austin to describe how he thanked her after she gave him the money, more than $9,000, and how she had seen him hold the door for a customer when he walked into the bank.
The movements that made her think Frazer might be armed don't appear to show up on surveillance photos, Digby said.
Austin, on the stand for 39 minutes, demonstrated for senior deputy prosecutor Patterson how she remembered Frazer moving his hand in the hoodie pocket. She said he seemed so normal when he stepped up to her window that when he handed her the note demanding money, she had to read it twice, she was so surprised.
Austin told jurors that staying calm was easy. But only up until the man left, she said, describing how she ran and locked the bank doors, screaming the bank had been robbed.
The encounter had been so fast and so quiet that no one had noticed what had gone on between her and the man, Austin said, telling jurors that someone asked if she was joking.
"My whole thought was, if I give him what he wants, he would just get out of here and nobody will get hurt," she said, her voice breaking as she recalled a moment of terror. "I didn't have time to be afraid. But after things calmed down, I got really scared."
Metro on 09/28/2016