Published: Thu, May. 14, 2009 02:00AM
Modified Wed, May. 13, 2009 11:10PM
RALEIGH -- A 64-year-old man on trial for murder said Wednesday that a seizure condition prevented him from recalling the day Raleigh police think he strangled and beat his longtime girlfriend to death.
"My mind, I couldn't hold onto no thoughts," Robert Lee Griffin told jurors about the November 2007 weekend that Naomi Harris, 61, was killed.
Now a Wake jury will have to decide what story they believe, Griffin's or that of the police. Griffin said he doesn't know who attacked Harris, 61, but asserted it wasn't he, despite a history of violence in their long, rocky relationship.
Meanwhile, Wake prosecutors and Raleigh police put forth evidence indicating that on Nov. 11, 2007, Griffin beat Harris in her Brookside Drive apartment off Wake Forest Road before strangling her to death. She was strangled with some type of string or rope to the point that it broke cartilage in her neck, according to her autopsy and Wake prosecutor Adam Moyers.
After listening to three days of testimony, jurors will return to court this morning to deliberate.
Griffin could receive a lifetime sentence in prison if convicted of first-degree murder.
He was the only defense witness to take the stand in the Wake courtroom Wednesday, telling jurors he couldn't recall much of that weekend. He had come to Raleigh from Maryland, where he was staying at a halfway house while paroled on a federal weapons charge, his attorney George Kelly said. Griffin said he'd had a seizure Nov. 9, 2007, and couldn't recall much else about that weekend.
Raleigh police think Harris likely was killed Nov. 10, 2007, possibly the same day neighbors recalled seeing a man resembling Griffin in the neighborhood clutching a knife. Harris' body was discovered the next day.
Also a mystery, Griffin said, was the bulk of an interview he had with Raleigh homicide detectives after he showed up the evening of Nov. 11 at Raleigh police headquarters on his own wanting to report his ATM card missing. "My head had never felt like that before," he said. "I do remember bits and pieces."
Harris and Griffin had been together off and on for more than two decades, their relationship marred with violence. Her daughter, Jacqueline B. English, said her mother would at times show up at her house in nightclothes, black eyes and bruises after a beating. Griffin was convicted in 1999 of assault with a deadly weapon, as well as in 2004 of assault on a female. Harris was listed as the victim in both cases.
But Harris, who worked cleaning at the N.C. Office of State Personnel, would always go back to him. English urged her mother to get help, even offering money to allow a move away from Griffin.
English said she hoped other women in similar situations would get out before it's too late.
"Leave, just leave now," English said. "It's just going to get worse."
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