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in The Nevada Sagebrush.

By Jessica Fryman

Samisoni Taukitoku testified Monday that he “just started shooting,” at a Halloween party last year where a university student and two others died.

The alleged killer said he doesn’t remember shooting anybody because he was dazed after several people jumped him.

“I was scared and I didn’t know what was really happening, so I jump up and pull my gun out of my waistband and just start shooting,” Taukitoku, 20, said during his first time testifying in the case.

When later questioned by police, he said he didn’t tell them he fired his gun because he didn’t want to incriminate himself.

Closing arguments in the case start Wednesday, after which the jury will deliberate.

Taukitoku faces three counts of murder with the use of a firearm and four counts of assault with a deadly weapon for pointing a .380 caliber handgun at other partygoers, including former Wolf Pack basketball player Tyrone Hanson.

Among the dead was Derek K. Jensen, a 23-year-old University of Nevada, Reno student half a semester from graduation and also the former president of Tau Kappa Epsilon. Charles Coogan Kelly, 23, of Truckee, Calif., and Nathan Viljoen, 23, of Fallon, Nev., were also killed at the party.

Taukitoku said problems really started when he tried breaking up a fight where his friends were on top of a thin black male.

“I try to stop the fight,” he said. “I try to grab the Pacific Islanders and leave.”

The Pacific Islanders he went with to the party, including a former UNR football player’s brother Saili Manu, stopped fighting and left the house, he said. Taukitoku then went back inside to tell the person who invited them that they were leaving.

Walking out of the house again, Taukitoku said a beer bottle hit his shoulder. Then people started accusing him of jumping the black man, he said, so he confronted the group with his gun.

“As I pull it out, everybody started running backwards and one individual stumbles to the floor,” he said. “I’m pointing my gun at him — at his face.”

Taukitoku said he kicked Hanson, the black male on the floor, no more than three times and continued pointing his gun at him when a woman  tried to cover him up.

As Taukitoku walked out of the house, he said he fired his gun into the grass a few times out of anger.

Then someone hit him again, he said.

“I get rushed by I don’t know how many people. But it’s like a lot,” Taukitoku said. “I get hit in the face and I fall to my knees.”
Then, Taukitoku said he started shooting.

“As you were shooting, was it like a rapid fire?” his defense attorney Taovaonga Vuki-Lui asked.

“Yes,” he replied.

“Did you intend at any point to kill anyone,” Lui asked.

“No.”

Taukitoku said he brought the loaded gun to the party because he’s been “robbed, jumped and shot at.”

In a meeting without jurors present, prosecutor Daniel J. Greco said Taukitoku’s reason for bringing a weapon to the party was “bogus.”

“That is not what normal people do,” Greco said.

Greco claimed that Taukitoku’s intent stemmed from a separate altercation two days prior, Taukitoku wanted to get back at college boys for not letting him party, Greco said.

After both sides argued about whether the information should be admissible, the judge decided to let the jury hear the story.

In front of the jury, former Sigma Nu member Daniel Peltier, 23, testified that Taukitoku and at least one other Polynesian male showed up to the fraternity’s Halloween costume party uninvited in the early morning hours of Oct. 26.

After “bumping” in the basement, the fraternity president asked Taukitoku and another Polynesian male to leave the party because they were not invited and had no costume, Peltier said.

Before the men left without “incident,” Peltier said Taukitoku told the fraternity members, “That’s fine. We don’t need costumes. We can get our guns.”

This story was originally published in The Nevada Sagebrush
on Nov. 11, 2008.
Original story on The Nevada Sagebrush website.