Oscar Grant's character, shooter both on trial

When Oscar Grant III was killed by a BART police officer on Jan. 1, 2009, he became a symbol to people who had never met him but saw meaning in his video-recorded death. In life, however, Grant was a 22-year-old work in progress.

The Hayward native held jobs at fast-food joints and a market, but wanted to become a barber - though his religious mother saw a future in the ministry. He became a father as a teenager, and planned to marry the mother of his child.

He was also a parolee taking steps to go straight - and avoid the fate of his imprisoned father - after a string of arrests that had taken him away from his daughter and girlfriend and had worried his tight-knit family.

Now, as the former BART officer who shot him during an arrest faces a murder trial that begins Wednesday in Los Angeles, Grant will take on another role. While Johannes Mehserle's actions on the platform of Oakland's Fruitvale Station will be judged, Grant's character will be on trial as well.

"It's unavoidable," said Darryl Stallworth, an Oakland defense attorney and former prosecutor who has followed the case, which marks the first time a Bay Area police officer has been tried for murder for an on-duty killing.

"When you're charging anybody - whether it's a police officer or John Smith on the street - with murder," Stallworth said, "if there was a physical altercation, I need to know if there's a history."

To some who put him on T-shirts and posters and invoke his name at rallies, Grant represents a history of police officers brutalizing men of color with scant consequences. Grant was black, and Mehserle is white.

Mehserle's defense, however, will try to convince the jury that Grant had a habit of putting himself - and police officers - in dangerous situations, even before he was shot after a fight on a train full of New Year's revelers.

Defense attorneys plan to call to the stand a San Leandro police officer who says Grant ran from him and a fellow officer with a loaded pistol in 2006 after a traffic stop, forcing the officers to shock him with a Taser and then kick him when he wouldn't put his hands behind his back.