Witness testimony in shooting trial inconsistent

Eyewitnesses offered differing – at times clashing – accounts of the fatal August 2022 shooting in Martin City during the second day of Del Orrin Crawford’s murder trial in Flathead County District Court.  

Prosecutors accuse Crawford, 42, of Kila, of gunning down Whisper Sellars and wounding her husband, Doug Crosswhite, during an argument over a golf cart outside the South Fork Saloon in the early hours of Aug. 27. Crawford, who has pleaded not guilty to a slew of charges stemming from the fatal confrontation including deliberate homicide, assault with a weapon and tampering with evidence, maintains he acted in self-defense.   

Special Deputy County Attorneys Thorin Geist and Selene Koepke are prosecuting the case. Crawford is represented by a group of defense attorneys led by Kris McLean of Missoula. Judge Dan Wilson is presiding over the trial.   

Crosswhite, whose testimony began the day prior, told jurors he and Sellars were joined by his sister, brother and brother's live-in girlfriend for a night out Aug. 26. The group ended up at the South Fork Saloon, which is where Crawford and other members of a wedding party arrived via a truck and golf cart later in the evening.   

Crosswhite's group, sans his brother’s girlfriend, Kristen Lundstrom, had exited the bar and found a golf cart parked outside sometime after midnight. Sellars, taken with the vehicle, hopped into it to take a selfie. All of them had been drinking, Crosswhite recalled.   

The cart rolled forward while the group hung out around it, which is what Crosswhite and his wife and siblings said they tried to explain to Crawford when he confronted them about it.   

The ensuing argument escalated into shoving, and Crosswhite admitted to laying Crawford out on the ground for allegedly pushing Sellars. But his recollection of the deadly confrontation ended with the bullet that struck him in the arm, he told jurors.

His siblings, Alicia and Brad Crosswhite, gave varying accounts of those moments. Alicia Crosswhite, who said she had summoned Lundstrom from the bar to join them as the argument escalated, accused Crawford of turning the disagreement into a fight. He shoved Sellars and then Lundstrom, she said.

She also recounted Crawford leveling the gun at Lundstrom after shooting Sellars and Crosswhite. Lundstrom, Alicia Crosswhite said, dropped to the ground screaming that she had children.

“Then he had seen me and pointed it at me and said, ‘You want some too, [expletive]?’ and I froze,” Alicia Crosswhite testified.

Brad Crosswhite told jurors that he could not recall who made the initial shove, but said it seemed likely that Crawford acted first. Crawford, he remembered, got increasingly angry even as they tried to explain themselves and calm the confrontation.

In Brad Crosswhite’s telling, Crawford got off the ground after being bowled over and pulled out a gun, pushing it into Lundstrom’s face. When she ducked, Crawford opened fire on Doug Crosswhite and Sellars, he said.

Both Alicia and Brad Crosswhite testified that none of their party had crowded around Crawford as he lay dazed on the ground following his run-in with Doug Crosswhite.

But Lundstrom recalled walking up to Crawford as he recovered from the push, lowering herself to eyelevel and “told him that he needed to get out of here and he shouldn’t be doing any of this.”

She testified that she used a stern tone with Crawford but refrained from profanity.

Later, asked to demonstrate that tone for the jury by prosecutors, she paused before imitating herself that night: “You need to leave and get the hell out of here or get the [expletive] out of here.”

JURORS ALSO heard from Chelsea Bauska, a former nurse who was leaving the bar with Crawford. The two had gone to high school together but crossed paths infrequently before they saw each other at the wedding party’s rehearsal dinner that evening, she said.

Bauska said it looked to her that Doug Crosswhite’s group was fiddling with the ignition to the golf cart as they approached. The group offered two simultaneous explanations for why they were around the golf cart, she recalled. They said it had started rolling and they stopped it, which struck her as odd as the ground was level. And they said they were taking selfies.  

None of them had a phone out, she said.   

Everyone began talking over each other, Bauska recalled. She turned to Brad Crosswhite to see if he could help calm the situation. A noise compelled her to turn back to see Crawford on the ground, his hands up and asking what had happened. 

Bauska said that both Doug Crosswhite and Sellars were towering over him.   

“At that point, I'm thinking for sure we’re going to get our [expletive] kicked ... or I'm going to have to figure out a way to get back into the bar and try to grab some people from inside," she said under cross-examination from defense attorney Tyson McLean.

Bauska said she was again asking Brad Crosswhite to intervene when the gunfire began. Asked if she saw Crawford aim the gun at Lundstrom, Bauska said no. She remembered only seeing Lundstrom once, and that was while Bauska was performing CPR on Sellars. Lundstrom, she said, was farther away and on her mobile phone.

Asked if she heard Crawford threaten anyone else, Bauska replied again in the negative.

THROUGHOUT THE day’s testimony, prosecutors circled back to a series of questions: Had anyone hit Crawford? Had they kicked him? Were they threatening him? Was anyone armed?

Though witness accounts of the deadly confrontation varied, all agreed that the only weapon brought to bear was Crawford’s gun. No one recalled him being punched, kicked or threatened.

In her opening statement, Special Deputy County Attorney Selene Koepke argued that an angered Crawford made the choice to shoot Doug Crosswhite and Sellars. One had shoved him to the ground while the other was “aggressive and in his face,” she said.

Crawford’s attorneys, who argue he fired in self-defense, highlighted how much alcohol the members of Crosswhite’s group drank before the encounter and that Sellars had smoked marijuana that night. They also asked whether any of them discussed the case prior to talking with investigators, something they all denied except for Lundstrom.

“... I think we only discussed it once,” she said under cross-examination from attorney Kris McLean. “It was right after [the shooting] with all of them."

After that, she said, she had only discussed it with Brad Crosswhite.

Brad Crosswhite earlier testified that the two avoided speaking about it, in part to keep it from their children.

Jurors also heard from Crawford via recorded 911 calls he made following the shooting. In them, he can be heard telling dispatchers he was followed out of the bar and attacked. Depending on the call, his voice altered from panicky to indignant.

In one, he says he was “bullied and put on the ground and attacked and defended myself ...”

In another phone conversation, this time with Sgt. Caleb Tappen of the Flathead County Sheriff’s Office, Crawford learns that people are hurt at the scene of the shooting.

“They’re [expletive] right they’re hurt,” he is heard saying. “They’re hurt because they hurt me. I have to be the one to walk down the road like I'm a [expletive] fugitive. That’s [expletive]. I didn’t do anything wrong.”