In the video, Dixon, 41, can be seen standing and running through the parking lot with his gun drawn. At one point, the car briefly moves toward him. But it turns and moves away from Dixon as muzzle flashes are seen behind it.
“When you fired the first shot,” Montgomery State’s Attorney John McCarthy asked Dixon in court while freezing a frame of the video on courtroom monitors, “was the car past you?”
“In the video, it shows it,” Dixon acknowledged.
McCarthy advanced the video bit by bit and asked Dixon about four additional rounds fired as the car drove away.
“When you’re shooting,” McCarthy said, “they’re fleeing for their lives.”
The quick-moving trial began Monday and included not only testimony from Dixon — who at the time of the encounter was an off-duty officer for the Pentagon police force — but also testimony from Michael Thomas, the driver of the Lexus sedan. He was not hit by any of the bullets but desperately drove his dying friends — Dominique Williams, 32, and James Johnson, 38 — to a hospital while on the phone with 911.
“He killed my friends!” Thomas shouted during the call to the 911 operator, a recording of which was played in court. “Please God, please God, please God, please God …”
Thomas, 38, also candidly told jurors why he and his two friends had gone into the dark parking lot in Takoma Park in the first place: to break into vehicles. “We were just riding around,” he told Assistant State’s Attorney George Simms, “checking to see what we could find.”
Riding in the back seat, Williams was struck by a bullet that went through the trunk of the car, into his back and into his right lung, according to prosecutors. Johnson was in the front passenger seat and was struck by a bullet that passed through the passenger seat into his back and through his heart, according to forensic and autopsy findings that prosecutors presented.
“The defendant was not going to let these people — Mr. Williams and Mr. Johnson and Mr. Thomas — get away,” Simms told jurors. “He appointed himself a one-man vigilante that morning.”
The issue for jurors does not appear to be whether Dixon fired the bullets or if the car was passing and moving away from him. It is whether, under the circumstances, he acted reasonably in a confrontation that lasted just seconds.
“I was in fear of my life, sir,” Dixon told one of his attorneys, Michael Lawlor, under direct examination. “I had a 2,000-pound vehicle come towards me.”
He added that the angle captured by the surveillance video did not reflect his view of the car as it started toward him.
In his opening statement to jurors, Lawlor appealed to their sense of public safety and highlighted his client’s 15 years as a police officer.
“Do we want people like him to walk away from crime?” Lawlor asked, adding, “When someone puts themselves in a situation — not to be a vigilante — but because they see a crime in progress, do we expect perfection of them? Or does the lack of perfection mean that you go to jail for the rest of your life?”
A challenge for Dixon and his attorneys could be that even if the jury accepts his reason for firing the first round, there were four additional shots fired as the car moved away.
The trial took place in a largely packed fifth-floor courtroom in Rockville. When Thomas’s 911 call was played, and the agony of his voice ripped through the room, two of Johnson’s family members covered their heads and ducked out into a hallway. Dixon’s parents have watched as well, sitting stoically and sharing glances with their son when he turned around during breaks in the proceedings. At one point Wednesday, the couple sat one row behind Thomas and within six feet of their son.
From the witness stand, wearing a gray suit and burgundy tie, Dixon testified Wednesday about his military upbringing, his own Air Force deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq, and his subsequent law enforcement career. On the morning in question — April 7, 2021 — he walked from his condo building, got into his car and started to drive out of the parking lot to his shift at the Pentagon.
Surveillance video showed his car passing an incoming car with what appeared to be part of a front headlight not working. Dixon testified that the defective headlight raised his suspicions, as did what he thought was an odd time for a car to enter the lot. As he looked in his rearview mirror, he said, he saw the car’s lights go off.
“I thought that was weird,” Dixon said, “so I decided to turn around and investigate.”
Dixon made a U-turn and headed to a corner of the lot. It was then , Dixon testified, that he heard glass break. He drove up to the sedan so that the cars were nose-to-nose.
Dixon said he saw one person in the car and another coming out of a broken-into work van. Then he spotted a third person. “With muscle memory, I jumped out of my car,” he said, adding, “My intention was to perform a citizen’s arrest.”
Shining a flashlight with one hand and pointing a .40-caliber Glock pistol with the other, Dixon said, he positioned himself directly in front of the Lexus. “Stop!” he recalled shouting. “Police!”
Behind the wheel of his Lexus, Thomas accelerated in reverse, turning his car while negotiating the corner of the lot and coming to a brief stop. Dixon ran after the Lexus, his gun still pointed, and again positioned himself in front of the car.
Thomas testified about what was happening inside. “Go!” said Johnson from the front seat.
Thomas said he shifted to go forward and turned to the right to avoid Dixon — movement confirmed by the video. For his part, Dixon didn’t move as the car passed him, a fact that prosecutor McCarthy said underscored that Dixon was under no real threat of being run over.
He played more of the video as he questioned Dixon.
“I’m looking at the wheels of the car,” he said. “Would you concede that the wheels of the car are turned? That vehicle appears to be turning in a direction away from you, correct?”
“In the video, yes, Mr. McCarthy,” Dixon said, “but my perception, it felt like I was in front of that vehicle.”
McCarthy asked an assistant to play two more seconds of footage.
“Watch your feet. Watch your feet,” McCarthy told the witness. “You never moved an inch when that car passed you, did you?”
“No, sir,” Dixon said.
“You were in such fear of your life,” the prosecutor said with a smirk, “that you didn’t even step back as this 2,000-pound vehicle was coming toward you? … You could have moved back, correct?”
“I could have moved back,” Dixon answered, “but it was hindsight 20/20.”
“You could have moved back?”
“Do you concede that you don’t move?”
The prosecutor then walked Dixon through all five gunshots, pointing out to jurors the muzzle flashes and Dixon’s shooting posture.
“Is that a military-trained position you took?” he asked.
It appeared to be, Dixon said, adding, “That’s the way I was trained.”
“And you were shooting at the back of that car, correct?”
“That’s correct,” Dixon said.
Given a chance to question his client again, Lawlor emphasized how quickly the events unfolded, particularly the second confrontation after Thomas had reversed the Lexus, stopped and then moved toward Dixon.
“Three seconds from the time the car started moving until you fired the first shot, right?”
“Yes, sir,” Dixon said.
