Video shows fatal stomping of Colorado Springs auto shop owner George Maldonado

Beaten, bound and forced onto his stomach with his hands tied behind his back, Full Throttle Auto Service owner George Maldonado Sr. was anything but a threat.

But that didn't stop one of his robbers from making sure with a single deadly stomp on the incapacitated man's head, authorities say.

"Right there - no provocation, nothing," prosecutor Nathaniel Marsh said Thursday as he walked a jury through surveillance footage that captured the fatal blow, allegedly inflicted by Eric William Grant, 39, after two men burst into Maldonado's shop last July disguised as utilities workers.

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On the opening day of Grant's first-degree murder trial, his defense team countered that Colorado Springs police arrested the wrong "black man with a beard," pointing to the video as proof.

Zeroing in on a different part of the footage, attorney Jennifer Stock noted the killer's bare arms and compared them with photos of Grant's, which are emblazoned with tattoos.

Any suggestion the video had failed to detect the tattoos was "baloney," Stock said, as Maldonado's tattoos were clearly depicted.

Competing interpretations of the footage are expected to take center stage at a more than weeklong trial before 4th Judicial District Judge Barbara Hughes. If convicted, Grant faces life in prison without parole. Derrick Davis, 59, is to be tried separately in August, also for first-degree murder of Maldonado.

The trial comes less than a year after the deadly encounter inside Full Throttle Auto, 305 N. Chelton Road, in which Maldonado and a customer were accosted by two men in hard hats and reflective vests shortly after the shop opened.

While Maldonado settled into his desk to get ready for the day, other cameras captured the intruders in a truck as it twice circled the business before the men came in through a back door, one of them announcing, "Colorado Springs Utilties."

After the break-in, both victims were hit in the face with pistols and tied up before the intruders ransacked a cash register and fled. Although the killers were armed, no shots were fired, prosecutors said.

"It didn't matter what they had to go through. It didn't matter what they had to do. They're there for one purpose, and that's the money," Marsh said.

In the wake of the killing, tipsters identified both men based on the surveillance images released to the public, prosecutors told the panel. The tipsters included Davis' sister, who also gave up his street name: Chili Dog.

Police say Grant's cellphone activity shows he was in the auto repair shop area during the heist, and one of his acquaintances reported that Grant privately confessed, telling him he dropped a magazine in the shop during the robbery, prosecutors said. That detail hadn't been made public, bolstering the man's account, Marsh said.

Stock said that informant was a parolee who would say anything to keep from going back to prison after failing a drug test. She said his claim about the magazine surfaced only after a court hearing in which police discussed evidence, and he was being held in the same ward as Grant's co-defendant when he made the report.

Stock said the cellphone usage was irrelevant because Grant had an apartment nearby. No fingerprints, DNA or other physical evidence links Grant to the shop or the truck, she said.

Grant's attorneys didn't explain why he left Colorado Springs on the day of the killing and flew to Philadelphia, where he was arrested in October. Davis left the city a day after the robbery, driving to Minnesota, where he was arrested July 17 at a Super 8 Motel in Bloomington.

Relatives of Maldonado filled half the courtroom as the trial got underway. They winced and quietly wept as prosecutors displayed photos of Maldonado's body, face down in blood on an otherwise tidy tile floor. A police officer and paramedic testified that injuries to Maldonado and the other man were so severe that they resembled gunshot wounds.

Testimony is expected to continue Friday morning.

Credit: Lance Benzel