PITTSBURGH — It's been more than four years since Robert Gregory Bowers opened fire on Shabbat services on a gray and rainy fall Saturday — since his name, and by extension Pittsburgh, became inextricably linked to the worst attack on the Jewish faith in American history.
His trial, finally, is imminent.
On Oct. 27, 2018, Pittsburgh joined Charleston, Las Vegas, Parkland, Aurora — another city, another setting, another group of victims, another type of gun.
This time it was Pittsburgh, at a synagogue during Saturday morning services. Eleven worshippers killed, many of them elderly. An AR-15 and three pistols.
The synagogue, a hulking stone building at the intersection of Wilkins and Shady avenues in Squirrel Hill, housed three different congregations — Dor Hadash, New Light and Tree of Life or L'Simcha. The latter congregation owned the building, and its name is written in English and Hebrew on the north wall.
"Tree of Life" became the grim moniker for the massacre, and the 11 Jewish congregants killed there became the faces of the nation's worst antisemitic attack: Richard Gottfried, Joyce Fienberg, Rose Mallinger, Jerry Rabinowitz, David and Cecil Rosenthal, Bernice and Sylvan Simon, Daniel Stein, Melvin Wax, Irving Younger.
Two congregants and four police officers were injured in the gunfire.
Jury selection in the federal case against Bowers, 50, begins April 24. He faces 63 charges and the possibility of the death penalty. The trial — from jury selection to sentencing — could last through July.
Bruce Antkowiak, a former federal prosecutor and defense lawyer now teaching law at St. Vincent College, said it's highly unusual for a case to move so slowly from indictment to trial.
"The defense in a case like this wants to get distance between the event and the trial in the hopes that the impact of the event will have somewhat dissipated," he said. "The courts are also interested in that, to a degree, because it makes it possible that you could get a jury from the area rather than have to go outside the area to get a jury."
There's another dynamic at play, Antkowiak said — one more specific to lead defense attorney Judy Clarke. Clarke, based in San Diego, has carved out a niche representing some of the country's most notorious criminals. Her specialty with those clients — who include Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, and Eric Rudolph, the Atlanta Olympic Park bomber — is making deals for their lives.
This is a case where there's little debate about what happened and who is responsible, Antkowiak noted — Bowers, after all, has tried to plead guilty. Prosecutors, though, have refused a plea deal.
The only real question is whether he will be sentenced to death.
His lawyer "spends an enormous amount of time with the client trying to establish a rapport and trying to develop all possible angles of dissents that can be developed," Antkowiak said of Clarke's style. "All of those things are going to take much longer than a normal case."
Acting U.S. Attorney Troy Rivetti is prosecuting the case. Others on the prosecution team include Assistant U.S. Attorneys Soo C. Song, Eric G. Olshan and Nicole Vasquez Schmitt.
Acting U.S. Attorney Troy Rivetti is prosecuting the case. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Among their challenges, Antkowiak said, will be arguing Bowers' crimes warrant a death sentence from the start of the trial all the way through sentencing. That can be a fine line for prosecutors to walk, Antkowiak said, especially if they argue that the death penalty is for retribution.
"If you understand retribution to be vengeance, [that idea] is a dangerous one for the prosecution," he said.
In some cases, prosecutors may argue that the death penalty is not for vengeance but rather to draw a line and say that society cannot tolerate such behavior.
'The death penalty is going to hang over everything'
The mood and feel throughout the federal courthouse — a monolith of a building rising 14 floors out of its 2.3-acre footprint on Grant Street — will no doubt be tense. But how it all eventually ends will cast a grim pall over everything else, said Bruce Ledowitz, a Duquesne University law professor.
"The only reason this case is going to trial is because of the death penalty," he said. "The death penalty is going to hang over everything, and everybody is going to be thinking about the death penalty all the time."
"In terms of a conviction, it's obvious," he added.
Indeed, Bowers has sought to plead guilty in exchange for a life sentence numerous times throughout years of proceedings. The government has declined to strike such a deal. The back and forth between the prosecutors and defense lawyers — pointed bickering in the form of federal court filings — began cordially enough. But 4 1/2 years later, it has at times devolved into scathing quarrels on paper.
"The defendant has not even attempted to provide any cause, much less good cause, for blatantly ignoring this court's pretrial motions deadline," prosecutors wrote in one recent court filing.
In May, prosecutors asked the presiding judge to bring Bowers into the courtroom in person and make sure he's aware of the rights he's waiving every time his lawyers have waived his right to be present during hearings. U.S. District Judge Donetta Ambrose oversaw the case until her retirement early last year, and prosecutors had previously but unsuccessfully asked her to bring Bowers before the court. U.S. District Judge Robert J. Colville will oversee the trial.
Prosecutors have proposed setting aside 20 of the courtroom's 40 gallery seats for survivors, victims' families and any people they might need for support. They've also proposed that four seats behind the defense table be set aside for Bowers' family. Any remaining seats would be reserved for members of the media and the public on a first-come, first-served basis.
Any homicide trial, Antkowiak said, has a different atmosphere.
"You have the family of the defendant on one side, the family of the victim on the other, and that alone creates a level of tension in the room that is palpable," he said.
The evidence against the shooter
After a jury is selected, the trial will likely take place in three phases. First comes a guilt phase, in which the jury determines whether or not Bowers is guilty of the 63 federal charges against him. If the jury convicts him, a second phase would determine whether Bowers is eligible for the death penalty, before a final third phase to decide whether he is actually sentenced to death.
Recent court filings give some insight into the evidence prosecutors intend to present.
In an April 3 filing, prosecutors asked Judge Colville to allow 911 recordings and police dashboard and body-worn camera footage to be allowed into evidence, along with some autopsy and crime scene photos.
They argued the graphic images are a necessary part of the initial guilt phase of the trial.
"Images of the 11 deceased victims with the synagogue are extremely probative of the defendant's specific intent and motive — that is, that he violently and lethally targeted victim congregants because they were Jewish and while they were engaged in the practice of their faith," the attorneys wrote.
The U.S. Attorney's Office has also signaled that it intends to play numerous 911 calls made during the rampage, including ones from victims who were killed.
"As the audio recordings of those calls make clear," prosecutors wrote, "the callers were terrified, were hiding from the defendant, and were hearing and describing gunshots, describing injuries to dispatchers, assisting law enforcement by identifying where they were hiding and suggesting possible means for law enforcement to enter the building, and screaming as they spoke to 911 operators."
Some of the calls lasted about an hour. Others lasted about a minute. The callers are identified in court filings only by their initials.
Prosecutors have also asked to present video and audio evidence captured by cameras in police cars and worn by officers, as well as radio calls by police to dispatchers. Specifically, they noted, in audio from some of those radio calls, "the officers simultaneously relay statements by the defendant." Body-worn cameras, they wrote, captured Bowers' statements as he was being taken from the synagogue and transported to Allegheny General Hospital.
Investigators have alleged from the beginning that Bowers expressed his hatred of Jews in the synagogue and to the police, making the attack a hate crime.
"They're committing genocide to my people, I just want to kill Jews," Bowers said at the time, according to the charges against him. Investigators have said he reiterated those comments and repeated his desire to kill Jewish people.
Bowers' lawyers tried unsuccessfully to have those statements suppressed.
Other pieces of evidence that defense attorneys tried to quash also give clues as to what might be presented at trial: evidence seized from Bowers' home, car and post office box, geolocation data collected from his phone and car, and evidence pulled from his cell phone and from social media sites.
Among Bowers' online profiles was one on Gab, a platform popular with far-right extremists. Investigators said Bowers used that account to espouse antisemitic views, including statements like "jews are the children of satan (sic)" and a photo of a body burning in a Holocaust crematorium with the caption, "Make Ovens 1488 degrees Again."
Just over a week before jury selection, it remained unclear how many statements from victims might be delivered during a potential sentencing phase, nor was it clear whether anyone from Bowers' personal life might testify on his behalf.
Bowers' attorneys said in court filings last month they intend to introduce evidence indicating their client has schizophrenia, epilepsy and other neurological issues.
Defense lawyers, Antkowiak said, are "going to try — in one way, shape or form — to reconstruct the defendant's life for this jury. Their entire psychological-social history will be developed to give the jury the full perspective on them."
Clarke, he said, has been relatively successful in arguing to jurors that a person accused and convicted of a serious crime is a person nonetheless.
The government, on the other hand, will work to show that the shooting was part of a deep-seated plan, executed in a precise way and with a larger perspective in mind.
"This development of this as a pathological act is important to the government's position," Antkowiak said, "that this is one of those rare cases for which this (the death penalty) is appropriate."
