A: It was just important for me to be precise about the whole event, to tell everything that happened, all the details, how it happened, what happened, what he said.
The Honorable Judge A. Hellman: This is an important detail in your eyes to understand why you shot when he was in the opposite direction from you?
The witness, Mr. Mukin: Yes, as if to make them understand that I didn't just shoot a human being.
The Honorable Judge A. Hellman: So she asks how this important detail didn't come up at the beginning of the investigation?
The witness, Mr. Mukin: First of all, I thought I'd already mentioned it in the first interrogation, but still.
The Honorable Judge A. Hellman: In the second interrogation she says that it was so important to you that you repeated it over and over again, so how did you miss it in the first interrogation?
The witness, Mr. Mukin: It depends on what the contexts of the conversations are. If you talk about it, then I explain it and I repeat, it depends on the context of why I say it."
The defendant's explanations give the impression that he is trying to hold the rope at both ends, when, on the one hand, he claims, he thought that he had given this detail to the interrogators already in his first interrogation (as will be recalled, the defendant did not mention this either in his first interrogation or in the reconstruction conducted with him), and on the other hand, he claimed that he remembered the exact details of the incident in the time that had elapsed since the incident until his second interrogation. These explanations cannot coexist, and I am of the opinion that they are intended to strengthen the defendant's version that he shot the deceased in the back because he threatened him and he felt a tangible danger to his life. In view of the fact that this alleged statement of the deceased is sufficient to substantiate the defendant's claim of self-defense (a claim which he later abandoned, as stated), it is difficult to accept that the defendant would simply forget to mention it, despite the opportunities he had to do so. Is it conceivable that the defendant fired shots, which up to that point he believed was the one who caused the death of the deceased, due to the deceased's threats, but would forget to tell about the reason for the shooting? I am of the opinion that this reason was born in the second interrogation of the deceased in order to justify the unjustified shooting carried out by the defendant, when the deceased was walking back to his car and with his back to the defendant.
- It should also be noted that there is a discrepancy in the defendant's versions as to the purpose of the shooting that he carried out at this stage of the incident, when according to the defendant, this shooting was intended to "neutralize" the deceased, as he put it. While at first the defendant described that he had fired in the direction of the deceased's upper body, later he described that he had fired at the deceased's lower body. This was apparently in order to create the impression that he did not intend to seriously harm the deceased, let alone cause his death, but only to neutralize him in a way that would remove the threat posed by him, according to the defendant. Thus, while in the reconstruction (P/3A) the defendant stated that he had fired "Towards the center of Massa" (p. 5, para. 18, para. 27), that is, the upper body, since in his second interrogation the defendant had already corrected and explained: "I told them I shot the center of mass, but the center of mass means stomach, waist, as if stomach and down... I shot in the abdomen, waist." (p. 30, paras. 17-21).
When the defendant was asked about the discrepancy in his versions in this context, the defendant again attributed it to the confusion in which he found himself after the incident (P/6B, p. 86, paras. 20 ff.):