The Sports Page Tavern closed in 2015.

But the trial for the man whom King County Prosecutors say shot and killed two people during a melee in the parking lot outside the tavern on March 31, 2013 began Jan. 23 at the Regional Justice Center in Kent.

Prosecutors have charged Cleanthony Jimerson with two counts of first-degree murder with firearm enhancements and one count of unlawful possession of a firearm in the second degree. Handling the case are Senior Deputy Prosecuting Attorneys Jessica Berliner and Dan Soukup.

The trial is before Judge Samuel Chung in courtroom 4H of the RJC. Closing statements are anticipated about March 6, but that could change, said Dan Donohoe, a spokesman for the King County Prosecutor’s office.

Jimerson’s original trial had been set for June 18, 2015 at the RJC but was postponed several times.

Jimerson pleaded not guilty to two counts of second-degree murder in March 2015 after he waived extradition and was brought back to King County from a Texas jail where authorities were holding him on other charges.

Prosecutors say Jimerson stood above Nicholas Greer, 24, and Lorenzo Duncan, 23, as they lay helpless on the ground and fired bullets into their heads and bodies, and that friends of the men then shot Jimerson.

At his first appearance, Jimerson, who was himself seriously wounded in the incident outside of the tavern, appeared in a wheelchair.

Prosecuting Attorney Jessica Berliner said previously that at trial she expected to amend the charges from second-degree murder to two counts of first-degree murder. Prosecutors have also charged Jimerson, a convicted felon at the time of the shootings, with one count of unlawful possession of a firearm.

Also killed in that early morning melee was Antuan Greer, 21. But according to the affidavit for determination of probable cause, the document in which Auburn Police lay out their case against Jimerson, a stray bullet, fired by an as-yet unknown person, probably killed Greer.

According to what witnesses told detectives, the argument that led to the fatal shootings started between two women on the tavern’s dance floor, one of the women being among the group that numbered Duncan, Lindsay and Greer.

The physical fight began outside in the parking lot, five minutes after closing, as about 100 patrons milled out, and security got busy directing people to their cars to clear the lot.

Loud talk outside by one of the women involved in the previous argument led to a fistfight between men in the two groups, according to the affidavit. According to the affidavit, a few of the fighters went south of the parking lot and out onto Auburn Way North to fight, and the rest began moving north through the parking lot, toward where the fatal shots were later fired.

Several witnesses told police that a woman first fired a warning shot into the air to break up the fight. Hearing that, one witness said, a man, perhaps believing that shots were being fired for real, ran to his car across the lot and grabbed a gun. An estimated 20-to-30 seconds after the warning shot, multiple individuals pulled out their handguns and began firing.

Although witness accounts of the fatal shootings vary widely, a number of witnesses identified or described Jimerson as the man who had shot and killed the two men.

While the shooting occurred nearly four years ago, the Sports Page Tavern has since gone out of business.