After Before and After

Phase 4: Chapter 65

February 17, 1993. 2:49 PM.

Larry Evans was a ticking time bomb, Luke Armstrong was a defiant brat, and Sam and Eric Brooks were pathological liars.

At least, that's what Dana Barnes would tell you if you asked her. But nobody in Courtroom 4 needed to ask given that this was the narrative Barnes spun for each of the four boys she had the pleasure of defaming so far. Currently, the state prosecutor was in the middle of questioning a member of the forensic team who handled the DNA testing of the blood on the hunting sticks, the same blood that was positively ID'd as belonging to Simon Bennett. The medical examiner on the stand at the moment was Gerald Klein, one of many who dealt with handling the forensic evidence in this case. It was Klein's job to take the results from the blood test and compare it against the results from the fingerprinting completed with each of the twenty-two boys post rescue, a precaution in place to eliminate any possibility of evidence tampering. Considering what a high profile case this was, it wasn't an unnecessary precaution.

"Dr. Klein, on what date did you receive the results of blood test completed on the sticks in question, Exhibits H1-21, for the court's records?" Barnes asked her current witness.

"It was February 25th of 1991, according to the lab's records" the doctor answered.

"And whose blood was confirmed to be on those sticks?" she questioned further.

"Simon Bennett, one of the children presumed missing and dead" he answered.

"Did members of your team receive the fingerprinting reports completed on the twenty-two boys who were rescued from the island in question?"

"Yes, all twenty-two" he assured her.

"I have two of those reports here with me today" Barnes declared as she pulled the documents off the prosecution table. She approached the witness after requesting permission, and set the documents down in front of him. "Mr. Klein, do you recognize the documents in front of you?"

"Yes" he replied.

"Can you state the nature of these documents for the members of the court, please?" Dana requested.

"They're fingerprinting reports our lab received on two of the twenty-two boys who were rescued from the island in late January" the witness explained.

"And the names of those boys are?"

"Samuel and Eric Brooks" he answered, to nobody's surprise at all.

"Did the reports tell you anything about the sticks in question, Exhibits H2 and H3?" Barnes prompted.

"Yes, they confirmed that Samuel and Eric's fingerprints were found on those two sticks that were used to kill Simon Bennett" he confirmed.

"Is it your belief that this is concrete evidence of their involvement in his death?" Barnes boldly asked, only to be countered immediately by Jeremy Reynolds with a firm objection.

"This clearly calls for speculation, Your Honor" Reynolds argued with confidence.

"Sustained" Judge Eldeson clearly agreed, shooting Barnes a doubtful look. "The transcriber will strike the prosecution's last question from the record."

Ralph assumed that Barnes' narrative was completely derailed based on how quickly she finished with the witness after that. However, the next witness she brought out was another member of the forensic team who handled the physical evidence in the boys' case back in 1991. This witness, Dr. Monté Bernard, was a forensic pathologist who specialized in pre-dating physical evidence to determine the date in which something occurred, even if a significant amount of time had passed. The doctor was a subset of coroner who worked with cadavers and blood evidence in death investigations.