Page 24 - David Saacks News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Now three years later two families filed into the durham county courthouse. one family hoping for a conviction, the other an acquittal. reporter john mccann covered the trial for "the durham herald-sun." >> the tone was definitely, you know, somber. shannon's family here. you got denita's people on the other side. tense is a good word for it. >> reporter: especially tense for denita's mother, sharon, who for the first time made eye contact with the woman accused of murdering her daughter. >> shannon would look at me with this little smirky look on her face. she's very cocky, like she knew she ...

Officers? >> no, i never did. >> and what you're suggesting is that durham cops, who didn't even know jermeir, looked away from a murder committed by a guy who worked for another department in another city? they're risking prison time for this guy they don't even know? >> cops will protect other cops regardless of what department they're in. there are always that few, not many. >> reporter: to the contrary, assistant district attorney david saacks, who was assigned to prosecute, says he was extra careful in building his case against shannon precisely because jermeir was a police officer. >> i ...

Explorer. >> he was very positive about the vehicle. he said, "yep, that's the vehicle that i saw." >> reporter: and that wasn't the only thing the witness noticed, says assistant d.a. david saacks. >> he remembers a patch or some kind of something, you know, on the shirt. >> reporter: a patch like on the uniform shannon wore as a 911 dispatcher. and there was more. investigators discovered shannon clocked in at about 10:00 a.m., some two hours after denita smith had been murdered. more than enough time for the 55-mile drive from durham to her job at the 911 center in greensboro. so police obt...

Police now hoped that mangled slug might provide a lead on who pulled the trigger. >> what kind of gun killed denita smith? >> all we could say is that the bullet itself was in the family of -- it had enough weight to be a .38-caliber round. >> reporter: by now denita's death was big news across durham. >> durham investigators say the shooting was not a random act. >> reporter: assistant district attorney david saacks was keeping a close eye on this now high-profile case. one that he might actually prosecute if a killer was ever caught. >> it was so obvious that it was not a robbery. and so if...

Herself, so she made sure denita smith wouldn't either. shannon, suggested prosecutor saacks, was either carrying a torch for jermeir or trying to burn down his whole world by killing his fiancee and pinning it on him. >> for whatever reason, she couldn't handle the situation between jermeir and denita. and to resort to this, just to me, speaks of desperation. >> reporter: the prosecution's star witness? jermeir stroud, whose courtroom testimony was broadcast on local tv. >> i kind of thought selfishly. >> reporter: jermeir confessing under oath the shameful sin he'd kept hidden for so long, h...