MONROE — The prosecution in the Jamez Hunter murder trial submitted what it portrayed as a clear confession to a killing.

State Bureau of Investigation Special Agent Brandon Blackman testified that Jamez Dorjan Hunter, 27, formerly of 124 W. Union St. Marshville, in a May 17, 2007, interview told him, “I’m strong enough to kill my grandma, but I’m not strong enough to kill myself.”

Also, a letter to The Enquirer-Journal in which Hunter asks for forgiveness for what he did, was admitted into evidence. Judge David Lee did not allow the letter on Tuesday, but permitted it after Union County jail detention officer Rachel Thompson showed a log with enough evidence for Lee to judge that Hunter wrote the letter.

“I have lost the person I loved most at the hands of myself, and I felt for a while after the incident that I don’t deserve to live,” reads part of the letter, published in the letters to the editor section of the May 30, 2007, The Enquirer-Journal.

Hunter is charged with first-degree murder in the May 6, 2007, death of his grandmother, Rosia Lee Hunter, who was found stabbed to death and with a golf-club handle protruding from her neck.

Blackman testified that sometime between May 6, 2007, and May 17, 2007, Jamez Hunter drove his grandmother’s 1996 teal Pontiac Grand Prix, license plate VTM-3516, to Lancaster, S.C., where he was taken into custody by police. Witnesses in Lancaster saw Jamez Hunter get out of the car, Blackman testified.

SBI agents Blackman and Christie Hearne interviewed Hunter at the police station and took a 10-page statement from him, during which Blackman said Hunter cried. After the interview, Hunter was charged with the murder.

During the interview, Blackman testified that Hunter said that he blacked out from crack cocaine in the evening of May 6, 2007. When he regained consciousness, he told them, he saw his grandmother dead.

Hunter told Blackman details about what he did after coming to, like trying to clean the blood off the walls and floor. “He was very specific of the events leading up to (the killing) and he was very specific about the events after (the killing),” Blackman testified.

Defense attorney Norman Butler argued that Hunter was under the influence of cocaine during the interview; Hunter had smoked crack cocaine at about 1 p.m. that afternoon and the interview started just before midnight. Blackman said that based on his training and experience with others who were under the influence of drugs, he was confident that Hunter was lucid during the interview. Furthermore, he said, Hunter remembered a time in the late 1990s when Blackman broke his nose in a basketball game that Hunter attended. Both Blackman and Hunter played basketball for Union County schools.

Blackman also testified that Hunter told him that cuts on his hands and chest were from a struggle with his grandmother. Butler said Blackman’s testimony was the first he heard of an admission to a struggle and told Lee, “I hate to be surprised on the battlefield.”

District Attorney John Snyder countered that, “Mr. Butler feigned surprise at the most convenient point,” and said the reference to a struggle should be admitted.

Butler made a motion to strike any reference to the broken nose because there was no evidence Hunter said it and also that any reference to a struggle between Hunter and his grandmother be stricken as well. Lee agreed and instructed the jury to not consider that testimony.

Snyder brought blood and fingerprint experts to the witness stand Wednesday afternoon and plans to rest his case late Thursday morning.