Friends of Sean Bell who stuck around to the end of his bachelor party were on hand to witness his death. Yesterday, two of those friends testified at the Queens trial of the three detectives charged in the 2006 shooting that killed Bell on the morning of what would have been his wedding day.

The first friend, Hugh Jensen, 31, described standing outside the strip club, Club Kalua, in the Jamaica section of Queens and trying to get the phone number of a woman he had met inside.

Deep in conversation with the woman, Jensen said he didn’t pay much attention to what was going on nearby. He said he didn’t hear the words of an argument that brewed quickly between Bell, 23, and a man standing at the curb next to an SUV. The man was earlier identified by lawyers as Fabio Ciocou. He was waiting to pick up his girlfriend, a dancer at the club. Jensen said he did notice one thing: Mr. Ciocou had his hand in his jacket.

“Of course, I thought he had a gun,” Jensen, a locksmith by profession, testified. In Jensen’s telling, Bell, who was unarmed, did not seemed worried. Bell turned around and flashed a “sarcastic grin in my direction,” Jensen said. Defense lawyers are likely to focus on this argument between Bell and Mr. Ciocou in the coming weeks. They are likely to try to show that the three detectives now charged with crimes — Michael Oliver, Gescard Isnora, and Marc Cooper — believed Bell or his friends were armed when the detectives tried to arrest them minutes later.

Jensen was about a minute behind Bell in leaving Club Kalua for the nearby street on which he and Bell had parked. Before turning the corner, Jensen heard what sounded like shots fired from “two or three guns.” When he turned the corner, Jensen testified that he saw Bell’s head leaning to the side in the driver’s seat. He testified that two men — whom he made for undercover detectives — waved their guns in his direction and told him to leave the block.