Video Tape Of Death Scene Shown To Jurors Defense Focuses On History Of Dead Man’s Alleged Abuse

Trembling and closing her eyes, Darlene Caba turned away from the television Tuesday as a jury stared at a gruesome video tape filmed in her home more than a year ago.

The courtroom TV played an image of Caba’s kitchen, her dead husband laying on the floor.

The camera moved in for a close-up of the long knife blade jutting from underneath his body. It panned to a nearby shelf where a revolver sat - the one Darlene Caba, 50, is accused of murdering her husband with.

Tuesday was the first day of testimony in Darlene Caba’s second-degree murder trial. A sheriff’s video tape, filmed shortly after the shooting, was part of the first evidence presented.

Defense attorneys portrayed Caba on Tuesday as the victim of years of physical, mental and sexual abuse, a woman trying to protect herself from an abusive husband.

Meanwhile, prosecutors focused on the use of a gun as excessive, portraying James Caba as a sickly man overpowered by a wife much heavier than him.

Oregon records show that this murder case is not the first time Darlene Caba has been investigated in connection with the shooting of her husband.

On Dec. 15, 1994, Kootenai County sheriff’s deputies found James Caba, 59, dead at the couple’s small home on Beauty Bay Road. He had been shot once in the chest.

James and Darlene Caba had been married since 1973.

During opening statements, defense attorney Glen Walker described how James Caba would fly into rages, push his wife down stairs and punch her in the face.

He would say “You can’t leave me because I’ll come after you and kill you,” Walker said.

James Caba had fired a gun only feet from his wife’s head inside their home and had once forced her to kill 20 of their pet rabbits, Walker said.

“You can’t imagine what hell that girl went through,” Donna Virnig, Darlene’s sister, said during an interview Tuesday. “He was a terrible person.”

Virnig said she watched James Caba throw her sister down and kick her. She said James Caba had wild mood swings in which he would either threaten to commit suicide or beg his wife to kill him. Virnig tried to convince her sister to leave him.

“She said, ‘I can’t leave him, he needs me. I love him,”’ Virnig said.

On Dec. 15, the couple had been arguing and drinking. Darlene Caba told investigators that her husband picked up a 10-inch knife. He then looked at the .38 Special lying on a nearby shelf and said maybe he would shoot her, Walker said.

Walker contends that Darlene Caba picked up the gun to protect herself. The gun then fired, although Caba doesn’t know how, he said.

“She loved him and she didn’t want to see him dead or shot,” Walker said.

But prosecutors said it is difficult to believe Caba would shoot so accurately if the gun had accidentally gone off.

During opening statements Tuesday, Kootenai County deputy prosecutor Lansing Haynes described James Caba as a sickly man who walked with a hunch because of prior back surgeries.

Haynes told the jury that Caba had changed her story when telling police what happened. He said she first claimed that James Caba fired the gun at her earlier that evening. She later admitted that he had fired the gun several weeks earlier, Haynes said.

In 1980, Multnomah County sheriff’s deputies found James Caba at his Oregon home with a bullet wound through his neck.

According to the Multnomah County sheriff’s report, Darlene Caba first told investigators that she was in her bedroom when she heard a gunshot and found her husband injured on the floor.

A short time later, she told the deputies that she accidentally shot James Caba “during the course of a family altercation.”

Darlene Caba later told detectives that her husband had been suicidal that night and grabbed a gun. She said that she tried to stop him from hurting himself and the gun accidentally went off, according to a transcript of the interview.

According to the report, sheriff’s deputies believed that James Caba had been shot in the back of the neck and not the front.

However charges were never filed against Darlene Caba in the shooting. James Caba would not cooperate with authorities, according to the report and insisted that he had shot himself.

It’s uncertain whether jurors in the murder case will hear testimony about the previous shooting.

, DataTimes