30-year-old Jerry Moore II of Bridgeport is charged with aggravated robbery with a gun specification, for the November 2006 robbery of the Brookside Insta-Cash store.

As the day began, the prosecution urged the five-man, seven-woman jury to keep their eye on the ball.

Assistant Prosecutor Dan Fry described the "ball" as a grouping of facts that show Jerry Moore II robbed the store.

Fry said Moore got up and called off work that day, then went to two different cash-lending businesses, insisting at both that he needed a loan by five o'clock that day.

Fry says the woman at the first one describes Moore as "creepy," seeming to be casing the place, staring at the security cameras and immediately losing interest when she said they had no money on hand.

Then Fry said Moore went to Insta-Cash, speaking to employee Beverly Haggarty, asking what he would need to bring back in order to get a loan by five o'clock.

Later, Fry says, Haggarty says it was Moore who came back, dressed in black with a toboggan pulled over his face, this time pointing a large silver-gray gun in her face and robbing Insta-Cash of $2,457.00.

Fry says minutes later, a witness saw Jerry Moore, dressed all in black, running toward his house.

Later, a bag of black clothes was found under a table in his house, also a 45-caliber gun, and $500 in a SkyBank wrapper was found in the console of his car the next day.

InstaCash reportedly used SkyBank wrappers.

The defense says the prosecution's "ball" has a hole in it, and won't hold air.

Defense Attorney J.C. Ratliff says the money in Moore's car was a gift from his parents.

And he says every prosecution witness has changed his or her story, some repeatedly.

He says the gun they found in Moore's house is not particularly silver-gray.

And he says a pizza man saw the robber running out of Insta-Cash that day, and he says the black man was too tall and too slender to have been Moore.

Ratliff says the woman at the first business changed her story significantly since the beginning.

He says she initially described Jerry Moore as "nice," never using the word "creepy" until much later.

The defense contends Jerry Moore was in the area because he lives there, and he was searching for his dog's electronic collar.

Ratliff says it was a total "rush to judgment," building a whole case around one person's word, and Ratliff insisted that person is not beyond suspicion herself.

He said a robbery victim is typically upset and distraught, yet this woman was "smiling, laughing, smoking and talking" an hour after the robbery.

The defense attorney said it was investigated by a Bridgeport Police officer who was 19 years old, who had only been on the force for two weeks.

He says it was a poor investigation, with no evidence preservation at the crime scene, and no transaction records from Insta-Cash.

The trial is expected to last the rest of the week.