"What did you want when they gave you a telephone?" Clark asked. Beatrice looked down at her good hand and thought of the moment her sons had arrived with shoes and a jacket. "I wanted someone who knew me before any of those officers did," she answered. She did not mention Jackson's military service, and the prosecutor did not ask about it. The point, as far as she was concerned, was that she had been frightened and needed help.
William Bradley stood for cross-examination after the prosecutor returned to his table. He did not approach Beatrice with the arrogance she had expected from watching courtroom dramas, and he began by acknowledging that the injuries were serious. He asked whether she believed her memory of every second was perfect. Beatrice answered that she had never claimed perfection and that she had been honest about the moments she could not recall clearly.
Bradley suggested that she might have missed a command because of the noise, the flashlight, and her acknowledged hearing difficulties. She said she could not rule out failing to hear something, but she remembered telling the officer where her papers were and following the direction to retrieve them. He then asked whether she understood why an officer might become concerned when a driver suddenly leaned into a compartment where a weapon could be concealed. Beatrice told him that she understood concern but not being pulled out by her hair after explaining the movement in advance.
"You have had disagreements with police officers before, haven't you?" Bradley asked. Beatrice looked at him as though trying to decide whether he was asking a serious question. She replied that she had once complained about cars speeding near the elementary school and had received a parking ticket twenty years earlier. Bradley asked whether she had ever refused to identify herself during a traffic stop, and she said that she never had.
The lawyer moved to the hours after the arrest. He asked whether Beatrice had been taken for treatment before being brought to the station, and she answered yes. He suggested that the officers must therefore have recognized the injury, but Beatrice pointed out that a desk sergeant had called for help after the officers brought her into the building. Bradley did not press that distinction because the station's records supported it.
He next asked why she had called her son rather than a bail bondsman. "Because I wanted my family," she said. Bradley asked whether she had known the men who injured her by name, and she replied that she had heard one call the other Stanton and had learned Reed's name later. Then he asked whether the names meant anything to the person she had telephoned.
Beatrice did not understand where he was going until he lifted a small digital device from the defense table. Bradley explained that he intended to play a recording of the monitored booking telephone and offered a copy of the relevant call. Clark immediately objected, arguing that the woman's later conversation with family could not justify force used earlier. Judge Wallace required the lawyers to explain the intended relevance outside the jury's hearing before ruling that a narrow portion could be considered for the limited purpose of evaluating a defense allegation about Beatrice's account and state of mind.