Scrugs jury reads his post-shooting note

The scrawl tumbles crazily over three white pages, stream of consciousness, fragments of sentences and words: "I cannot believe I shot at a phila cop. . . . My life is over."

It is 9:45 a.m. on Feb. 15, 2009, and Rasheed Scrugs has awoken after surgery for multiple gunshot wounds received a little more than 36 hours earlier in a showdown at Broad Street and Olney Avenue.

Police Officer John Pawlowski, 25, five years a cop, four months married, and an expectant father, is dead.

Scrugs, 35, is groggy and intubated, and cannot speak.

The handwritten statement he produced then was introduced by his lawyer Friday during Scrugs' death-penalty hearing in Common Pleas Court.

Defense lawyers David Rudenstein and Lee Mandell are expected to argue next week that Scrugs' note demonstrates early remorse and justifies a life sentence, not death by lethal injection.

Prosecutors Edward McCann and Jacqueline Juliano Coelho are expected to argue that the note is self-serving and is at best Scrugs' first realization of the desperate situation he put himself into.

Judge Renee Cardwell Hughes ruled that the note must speak for itself - literally. It was projected onto large-screen monitors, and each juror got a copy to silently read and return.

Regardless of interpretation, for the jury of eight women and four men, the note was a rare window into the mind of an admitted killer.

According to a prefatory statement agreed to by the prosecution and defense, the note was written when Scrugs was in recovery at Albert Einstein Medical Center, two blocks from the shooting scene.

Scrugs awoke and asked the attending nurse for paper and pen, and began to write about the shot officer. The nurse removed the paper and told Scrugs to write only about medical issues. The nurse handed Scrugs a clean sheet of paper, and again he began to write about the officer. Again the nurse removed the paper and gave Scrugs a clean sheet.

This time, Scrugs began, "I have a cough. Please give me a little water" - and then wrote about the shooting. This time, the nurse let Scrugs write on and, after he finished, handed the pages to a police officer on guard.

"I do not know every that happ - I cannot believe I shot at a phila cop. I want to say to the family. Please tell me exactly what what," the note trails off.

Scrugs writes for his mother to call him, leaves a partial phone number, and adds: "My life is over. I have 4 beautiful children.

"I was smoking wet [marijuana soaked with PCP]. I got into a argument. And I felt a sharp pain in my back.

"Nothing I can say," the note continues. "Did I kill a police officer. Please tell me he is still alive. Read it to me."

It concludes: "What time. Please tell me officer. If I shot a cop my life is over. I was wrong for carrying a gun. I'm sorry. Can't breathe."

Scrugs, a paroled robber from West Philadelphia who had been laid off and was working as a gypsy cabdriver, pleaded guilty to first-degree murder Oct. 21 on the first day of his trial.

That moved the case into the penalty phase, in which the jury must decide whether Scrugs should spend his life in prison without chance of parole or die by lethal injection.

Hughes told the jurors Friday that the defense would complete its case Monday. On Tuesday, she said, the lawyers will make closing arguments, she will instruct them about the state's death-penalty law, and they will begin deliberations.

Earlier Friday, a defense-hired forensic psychologist provided the jury with mixed views of Scrugs' mental state at the time of the shooting.

Jonathan Mack said Scrugs' hair-trigger personality during the Feb. 13, 2009, confrontation with Pawlowski could have been caused by a combination of brain damage and use of the illegal street drug PCP.

But under questioning by Rudenstein, Mack also said he believed Scrugs knew the difference between right and wrong and could have formed the intent to kill.

And Mack testified that he could not say whether Scrugs' brain damage was of long standing or the result of loss of blood and a fall after he was shot by police during the confrontation.

Mack's testimony is crucial to the defense effort to convince the jury of a mitigating factor that warrants a sentence of life in prison over death.

Mack testified that Scrugs had a violent reaction to PCP before - a 1997 incident in which he was involuntarily committed, restrained, and administered antipsychotic drugs.

Scrugs has admitted smoking PCP-laced marijuana before he roughed up a cabdriver and then shot Pawlowski when he and a partner responded to the cabbie's 911 call.

The cabbie testified that Scrugs, whom he knew, seemed unusually aggressive and angry that night and became infuriated when he called police, warning: "If you call the cops, I'll shoot you and the cops."