The tragic sequence of events that led to the death of Alex Nieto on March 21, 2014 got a new and weird detail added to it with the conclusion of witness testimony on Tuesday. Evan Snow, a witness for the city who was walking his Siberian husky in Bernal Heights Park that evening, testified that he had a scary encounter with Nieto shortly before Nieto was shot by police — and, as Mission Local reports, Snow is the only non-police witness to testify who claims to have seen Nieto draw and point his Taser gun at him.

Snow, who was perhaps not the greatest witness for the city's side, had to answer to a couple of troubling elements of his earlier deposition to police under cross-examination — namely that he used a racial slur in reference to Nieto when relaying the story to a friend via text, and that he said he was distracted at the time of the incident by a female jogger with a nice butt.

Like the two police officers who arrived shortly thereafter, Snow believed at first that Nieto's holstered weapon was a firearm. As the Chronicle explains, under cross-examination, Snow admitted that he had inadvertently allowed his dog to approach and bark at Nieto — his one-year-old dog had an apparent history of "aggressively" pursuing people with food, as 48 Hills adds.

In response, Nieto drew and aimed his Taser either just at the dog, or at both Snow and his dog. Per the Chron, "I thought it was the grip of a pistol, and I was incredibly frightened,” Snow said. “I froze in my tracks.”

Unlike police, he quickly saw that this was not, in fact, a lethal weapon, and beat a retreat with his dog. He later told police that he stereotyped Nieto as a probable gang member because of his red jacket and flat-billed black cap — items of clothing he associated with gang members at his alma mater, Berkeley High. He texted a friend, in the aftermath, that he wished he lived in Florida so he could have shot Nieto without fear of legal consequences. And he tried to explain that the racial epithet he used was one that his own grandfather, who is of Hispanic descent, used casually and in a "friendly, colloquial manner."

The story Snow tells backs up the account of another dog-walking witness, Justin Fritz, who earlier testified that his partner, with whom he was walking a dog in the park that evening, saw Nieto "shadowboxing and practicing drawing his Taser." Fritz himself had not seen the weapon, but did see Nieto pacing by the bench where he'd been eating his dinner, and Fritz was the first person to call the police and report seeing a suspicious man with a gun.

A final expert witness Tuesday, former Berkeley and BART police officer Don Cameron — and frequent expert witness on behalf of police, per 48 Hills — was called by the defense to rebut earlier expert testimony for the prosecution regarding the appropriateness of the police officers' reaction and use of deadly force. Specifically, as KRON 4 reports, he said that if Nieto refused officers' commands to show his hands and if he appeared to be reaching for a weapon, "I think the talking’s over. You've got to react to it."

Adante Pointer, the attorney for the Nieto family, has tried to stress that the police are the only ones who saw Nieto reach for or draw his Taser, which they thought to be a gun with a red laser-pointing sight on it, and that their key witness saw Nieto with his hands in his pockets up until the moment he was shot.

Closing arguments are happening today, Wednesday, and the jury is set to begin deliberations. 48 Hills' Tim Redmond decided to preempt the proceedings and write his own closing argument for the prosecution, beginning with the caveat that he is "not a lawyer." I'll just leave that right here.

Previously: Rookie Cop Fired 23 Shots At Alex Nieto, Thought Niners Jacket Was Gang-Related