RALEIGH, N.C. –
NBC17.com will blog live throughout the Jason Young trial. Young is accused of murdering his pregnant wife, Michelle, in their Raleigh home in 2006. The first jury could not reach a decision in June.
The Jason Young re-trial opened Monday in Wake County Superior Court with the prosecution suggesting Young’s testimony could not be trusted. The defense, however, responded that the facts show Young did not commit the crime.
In the previous trial, Young took the stand at the last minute, and prosecutor Becky Holt appeared surprised to see him testify. Holt pressed Young on his version of what happened, but Young was ready to parry her efforts.
This time, though, Holt was prepared, and she reminded the jury he had 1,693 days to give his side of the story before finally taking the stand.
Holt emphasized that the Youngs had a difficult marriage, in part because of their different personalities.
“She was the planner, the organizer, the type-A personality, the hard worker, the one who strove in her job to meet jobs, the accountant — the sometimes uptight personality,” Holt said.
“He was the free spirit, the adventure lover; irresponsible, immature, the life of a party, the jokester, the salesman.”
Holt emphasized salesman, an obvious push to get the jury to question what he might say if he takes the stand again.
But defense attorney Mike Klinkosum, in a methodical attack that followed, emphasized that Young did not commit the crime in November 2006. Klinkosum acknowledge that Young could be “a jerk” but said the facts did not support a conviction.
“We don’t convict people of murder because they sometimes act like jerks,” Klinkosum said.
The two attorneys, with months to prepare, gave thorough, detailed descriptions of their lines of attack.
Holt, again appealing to the emotion of the jury, brought Michelle’s sister, Meredith, to the stand to describe the relationship between Jason and Michelle – which was rocky – and detail what Meredith saw the day she found Michelle’s body in their Raleigh home.
But unlike the first trial, the emotion from Meredith was less raw. She dabbed at her eyes during the difficult parts of the testimony, especially recalling the day she found Michelle and the surreal scene of finding her niece there with her mother’s bloody body.
The brutality of the day was evident in the 911 call, which prosecutors replayed.
“She’s cold,” you can hear her say. “Her body is stiff. Oh my god.”
Live blog from Monday’s testimony:
4:30 p.m.: Meredith Fisher listened while they replayed the 911 call from when she found her sister, and you can feel the savage nature of the attack in the call.
“Is she breathing?” the dispatcher asked.
“I don’t think so. Michelle?” Meredith said.
“She’s cold.”
She rolled Michelle over and said, “Oh my god. … I really think she’s dead.”
The dispatcher told her to try to roll Michelle on her back to administer CPR, but Meredith said, ”She’s cold. Her body is stiff. Oh my god.”
The dispatcher asked Meredith to take Cassidy outside, and she did.
Meredith Fisher just finished her testimony. Anthony Scott Hughes, with EMS, is now testifying.
4:19 p.m.: Meredith Fisher is describing entering the house the day after Michelle was killed. She saw Michelle’s pocket book and called out for her after entering the back.
But she didn’t hear a response and headed upstairs. She a maroon color, assumed the child had gotten into Michelle’s hairspray. She had no idea at first it was blood.
“I looked to the left and that’s when I saw Michelle on the floor,” she said.
Obviously, the testimony is difficult and emotional, but Meredith has been much less shaken this time on the stand.
3:25 p.m.: Jason and Michelle Young had a difficult marriage, as described by Michelle’s sister, Meredith.
Meredith had moved to North Carolina to help with the couple’s child, Cassidy, and she often wound up talking to the two about their problems.
“A little fight would turn into the silent treatment for days,” Meredith said on the stand Monday. “They didn’t know how to fight at all. They didn’t know how to get along. I can think of waaaaay more times they fought than they got along.
“Pick an issue … It was always something.”
Meredith said a key problem was how they disagreed on Michelle’s mother, Linda Fisher. Jason and Linda did not get along, and Jason did not want Linda to spend long amounts of time at their home over the holidays in 2006.
“Jason wanted to put a cap on how long my mom was allowed to stay at the house,” Meredith said.
“He wanted her to stay at a hotel. And Michelle didn’t want that.”
Meredith said that in discussions with Jason and Michelle, Michelle’s concerns focused on having better communication, Jason being more responsible and being together as a family.
“She wanted to be more family-oriented,” Meredith said.
“His main concern was my mom and their lack of sex in the marriage.”
But Meredith recalled Michelle saying Jason was more interested in the physical part of the relationship than the more intimate, emotional side.
“Her desire was for him to be more romantic, to be more intimate, and not to just have sex. …” Meredith said.
“That really isn’t how things were handled in their sex life.”
Meredith was part of a four-hour discussion between the two. And Meredith said she distinctly remembers Jason’s final remark.
“His final comment was, all of this would just go away if you’d just let me have a girl on the side,” Meredith recalled.
2:35 p.m.: Back in session. Interesting moment – Judge Donald Stephens just told the jury not to consume alcohol at lunch.
He said he’d never had to tell a jury that before, but that there were some incidents involving that during jury selection, and those jurors were dismissed.
Meredith Fisher is now testifying again. She just told the jury that Jason Young had overcorrected while driving, and had an accident. Michelle was in the car, and later had a “medical abortion” becuase the baby inside her had stopped developing.
12:52 p.m.: Meredith Fisher just described the layout of the house. You can see it on the poster produced by the prosecution.
She said she had a good relationship with Jason, and a very close one with Michelle, especially as she got older. Adn she said she loved Cassidy, their daughter.
“I moved down here the day she was born and fell in love with her,” she said.
Tearing up, Meredith said Cassidy called her “Emmie.”
“It was a poor attempt for her to call me ‘Auntie Em,’ like the ‘Wizard of Oz,’” she said. “Emmie is what stuck.”
Judge Donald Stephens stopped the proceedings for lunch at 1:00 p.m. with Meredith still on the stand.
The trial will resume at 2:30 p.m.
12:40 p.m.: Meredith Fisher, the younger sister of Michelle Fisher, is on the stand. Much of the testimony so far has been the back story – how Michelle got pregnant and she and Jason decided to get married as soon as possible, how the marriage was set to not interfere with an N.C. State football game, how Meredith agreed to move to Raleigh for a year to help with child care.
11:38 a.m.: Defense attorney Mike Klinkosum is addressing the jury now. And he just put forth the essence of his case.
* He told the jury that there were two sets of footprints in Michelle Young’s bedroom and the footprints have never been positively identified to any shoes that Jason Young owned.
* He told the jury that fingerprints in the room remain unidentified.
* He said that the DNA on Michelle Young’s jewelry box remains unidentified.
* He said “not one drop of blood” was found in his car and that “not one hair” was found in his hotel room in Virginia.
“This case has never been solved, ladies and gentleman, and Jason Young did not murder his wife and his unborn child,” Klinkosum said.
Klinkosum admitted Young committed many acts of boorish behavior.
“I am not here to tell you Jason Young was a good husband. He was far from it,” Klinkosum said.
“You are going to hear he acted like an obnoxious jerk,” Klinkosum said. But he added, “We don’t convict people of murder because they sometimes act like jerks.”
Klinkosum said a conviction requires solid evidence, which does not exist in this case.
11:14 a.m.: The voice of prosecutor Becky Holt rose in particular when describing Jason Young’s actions after the murder of Michelle. He never cooperated with police, she said, and never helped with the investigation and never checked in on it.
“A man whose wife has been brutally murdered, in his home, does not call to say, what is your investigation reveal? What is going on?
“You’ll learn in this case that Linda Fisher, and Meredith Fisher, constantly called law enforcement. What do you know? What have you find out? What is your investigation showing?”
She noted that Jason Young gave up custody of his daughter rather than be deposed in a civil suit.
“He did finally take the stand in the first trial, as she noted, “1,693 days after his wife’s murder,” she said.
She closed her opening statement by saying,
“Jason Young is responsible for the murder of Michelle Young,” she said. “He is guillty of first-degree murder.”
10:58 a.m.: Holt repeating to the jury facts of the case with the preface, “You will learn …”
You will learn “some awfully strange events happened at the hotel.”
A door was propped open. A camera was moved. Jason Young changed clothes and went outside. A camera was moved again.
And she just told the jury how investigators worked their way to Hillside, Va., where Jason Young had stayed, and happened to find a gas station in King, N.C., where a clerk claimed Young had been there.
“The reason the clerk remembered him was because he was so angry,” Holt said.
Holt said Jason was angry because the clerk insisted he give her money or a credit card before pumping gas.
“He was angry,” she said. “He cussed her.”
10:51 a.m.: Holt tells the jury about the scene from the morning of Nov. 3. Michelle’s sister, Meredith Fisher, came to the house that day because Jason Young had asked her to get some paperwork for a Coach bag in his office.
“What she discovered when she got to the Birchleaf house was horrific,” Holt said. “She found her sister in her bedroom having been beat to death. She found her niece hiding under the covers in the master bedroom.
“She found little footprints in blood. She found them around Michelle’s head. She saw them as she was coming up the stairs in Cassidy’s bathroom. She found baby dolls. A baby doll by Michelle’s head.
“And she heard Cassidy say, ‘Mommy’s got boo boos.’”
10:47 a.m.: Prosecutor Holt went through Jason Young’s infidelities point by point with the jury.
10:26 a.m.: Prosecutor Becky Holt is on the offensive with her opening statement. In the first trial, she seemed unprepared when Young took the stand.
Young was convincing enough then – at least to some jurors – that a re-trial was necessary.
This time, Holt opened with a line of attack to address that. She drew a sharp line between Jason and Michelle Young in their marriage.
“She was the planner, the organizer, the type A personality, the hard worker, the one who strove in her job to meet jobs. The accountant. The sometimes uptight personality,” Holt said.
“He was the free spirit, the adventure lover. Irresponsibile. Immature. The life of a party. The jokester. The salesman.”
She emphasized “salesman” with an ominous tone, one sure to send a message to the jury that you can’t fully believe what he said.
Holt went on to say that Michelle was moving into a more permanent, settled marriage life, one that emphasized the family.
“She wanted the home. She wanted the family,” Holt said.
“Jason on the other hand was resistant.”
Holt said of Jason,“He was stuck in the college life.
“He would go to parties. He would get drunk.”
He wanted to out with the guys and didn’t emphasize the family enough, Michelle felt, Holt told the jury.
“That became an increasing course of friction between them,” Holt said.
10:09 a.m.: Judge Donald Stephens is going through firm instructions to the jury.
“Don’t make any final conclusions in your mind until you have heard all the evidence in the case and you retire to deliberate,” he said.
Stephens was emphatic on this point – don’t make any decisions early.
He also explained, and again in emphatic terms, that the fact that Jason Young is accused doesn’t mean he is guilty. The state of North Carolina, Stephens said firmly, must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Young is guilty.
9:52 a.m.: Jurors are being called to their seats to get ready for the trial. Twelve jurors are now seated and there are four alternates, Judge Donald Stephens told the court.
9:38 a.m.: Court is back in session for Jason Young’s retrial. Right now, the court is looking to get jurors seated and ready.
Prosecutors said during the first trial that Young had time to drive back from Virginia, kill Michelle, and return to cover his tracks.
You can keep track of the trial right here on nbc17.com where we will be live streaming and live blogging every day of the trial.
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