INDIANAPOLIS — Simmie Poetsema was a hero to his fellow special forces soldiers of the Netherlands Armed Forces.
Poetsema rescued people fleeing the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in 2021.
His unit was akin to America’s Delta Force and was in training at the Muscatatuk Urban Training Center in Jennings County a year later.
Walking back to his hotel with his comrades in arms after Indy’s South Meridian Street bars closed at 3 a.m. on Aug. 27, 2022, investigators say Poetsema and friends tangled with the Duncan brothers Shamar, Tyrese and Robert, who had been out drinking and smoking marijuana.
A fight ensued. Tyrese learned the hard way not to trade punches with special forces commandos and landed unconscious on the ground. The Duncans jumped into Robert’s truck, pulled a U-turn on Meridian and drove past the Hampton Inn at the corner of Maryland and Meridian and spotted the Dutch soldiers they had just fought returning to their hotel.
Opening statements were heard in Marion Superior Court in the trial of Shamar Duncan, accused of the killing of Poetsema and the wounding of two other soldiers.
“Not from not very far away the defendant took aim with a semi-automatic handgun and started shooting into a crowd of unarmed people,” Marion County Deputy Prosecutor Daniel Cicchini told jurors. “The same crowd were some of the same people who had just been in a fight that he and his brother lost.”
Defense Attorney David Margerum told jurors his client is guilty, not of murder but of reckless homicide because he didn’t intend to kill Poetsema as he fired wildly from the backseat of his brother’s truck.
”He did fire a gun. He did fire a nine-millimeter weapon into that hotel and he will tell you he didn’t mean to kill anybody. He’ll tell you he kind of did it in a blind rage,” Margerum said.
The prosecution told jurors they would hear from Robert Duncan who will claim he didn’t know his brother was armed or intended to shoot the soldiers.
The defense said Duncan would testify in his own defense.
The trial is being closely watched back in Poetsema’s home country where last year there were 133 homicides in a nation of 18 million people.
Indianapolis, by contrast, recorded 209 homicides among a population of 886,000 Hoosiers.
Paul Jensen is covering the Duncan trial for the Netherlands leading national newspaper The Telegraaf.
“We all know there’s a lot of guns in the U.S. and a lot of gun violence. You have like 40-50,000 fatalities, gun violence-related a year. That’s something unimaginable for people in Holland,” Jensen said.
Poetsema’s family and friends, as well as fellow soldiers, are also attending the trial.
In the gallery for the first testimonies was Toni Wilson-Taylor, whose daughter Stephani received an organ donation from Poetsema to replace her failing pancreas.
Among the first witnesses to testify was one of Poetsema’s mates, a combat medic named Marcel, who told jurors how he was shot in the buttocks and was minutes from bleeding out in the lobby of the hotel if he hadn’t instructed another soldier how to halt the blood flow from his wounds.
Key diplomats from the Netherlands and Washington were in consultation the weekend of the shootings.
The trial is expected to last the rest of the week.
