Somebody Did This to Her. On Day 1, Nobody Could Say Who.

Paitin Fields was five years old. In the early hours of November 13, 2017, a young man ran up to the ambulance door of a small emergency room in Burgaw, North Carolina, with her limp in his arms, and banged on it until the nurses let him in. That young man was her uncle, David Prevatte. He was 19. He says he woke to his mother screaming, found his niece unresponsive, tried to save her, and carried her in himself. The State of North Carolina says he is the reason she needed saving.

He was named a suspect in 2018. He was not charged until 2022. In the years between, the State has never said in public what changed between those two dates. That is the question I carried into this trial, and it is the question Day 1 did not answer.

What Day 1 answered instead was a different question, put to witness after witness. Was something done to Paitin? The two night nurses saw the marks on her neck the moment she was on the bed. The ER doctor, the doctor who ran the pediatric intensive care unit in Wilmington, and two nurse examiners each told the jury, in their own words, that what happened to her was no accident. The ICU doctor put it in five words: "Somebody did this to her."

And every time a witness was walked toward the question of who, or when, the answers sounded alike. The ER doctor had no opinion on what made the mark he saw. The ICU doctor was never asked about it by the sheriff's office and was never told what investigators found in the house. Both nurse examiners said they could not say exactly when the injuries they documented happened. That is the day in one paragraph. The rest of this piece is why I think it matters, and what the State still owes this jury.

One thing before anything else. David Prevatte has pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder and the other charges in this case. He is presumed innocent. Nothing a witness said on Day 1 changes that, and the jury has heard only the start of the State's case. I will tell you what I think as we go, and I will tell you when it is my opinion. The verdict belongs to twelve people in Burgaw, not to me.

Two promises before the first witness

The judge started the day with instructions to the jury, and one of them matters for everything that follows. An opening statement, the judge told the jurors, is only an outline of what each side believes the evidence will show. It is not evidence. I am going to treat both openings exactly that way. They are promises. Day 1 is where we write them down, so that when the trial ends we can hold each side to what it said it would deliver.

The lead prosecutor, Shirley Smircic, opened at the hospital. When Paitin was brought in, she told the jury, the nurses and the doctor working to save her saw marks on her neck right away. They stabilized her and sent her to the pediatric ICU in Wilmington, where more injuries were found and specialist nurse examiners were called in to examine and photograph them. Paitin did not survive. She was five.

Then the prosecutor took the jury back a few days. On November 10, 2017, David Prevatte turned 19, argued with his girlfriend, and moved back into his mother's home in Pender County. His mother, Lisa Hunt, and his stepfather, Dale Hunt, had custody of two granddaughters at the time: Paitin, who was five, and her older sister, who was seven. The girls slept on an L-shaped couch in the living room. The State described an ordinary weekend, a family trip on Saturday to see relatives, a friend in the yard on Sunday afternoon, an evening out that Sunday night with a woman who dropped David back at the house around ten. His mother let him in and locked the door behind him.

"As the night went on," the prosecutor said, "what would happen would be unfathomable."

Here is the State's account of the night, and I want to be careful to keep it labeled as the State's account. Around three in the morning, the older sister woke up. She saw her uncle standing by the couch next to Paitin, and then watched him walk back to his room. When she looked at her sister, something was wrong with Paitin's eyes. She went to her grandparents and told them Paitin was acting funny. They were half asleep, thought she was being a kid, and sent her back to bed. She turned on the TV and sat on the couch. Not long after, the grandmother got up, saw Paitin, and screamed. Dale and David drove Paitin to the emergency room themselves. She was admitted at 3:50 in the morning.

Then the prosecutor laid out what is coming: about thirty witnesses. The medical witnesses first. Then the people in the house, including Paitin's sister, who is now almost sixteen. Then the three people who spent that Sunday evening with David. Then the deputies and detectives, and the recorded interviews. Then the investigators who searched the house, and here she asked for the jury's attention on one item. "I urge you," she said, "to pay attention to a pair of red earbuds that they find in David's room."

The last big group, she said, would be the lab analysts. Evidence in this case was tested when it first happened, and, in her words, "they were tested later on after some advances in DNA technology." She named three things to watch: the swabs from Paitin's medical exam kit, a swab taken from David Prevatte, and those red earbuds.

She closed on a line I wrote down the moment she said it: "The eyewitness, Paitin Fields, is dead, but the evidence taken altogether can speak for her." She asked the jurors to use their common sense and "put the pieces of this puzzle together. Because the picture will be clear."

WATCH: THE STATE'S OPENING (CLIP), LIVE 10:30 AM ET FRIDAY, OCT 2 The Uncle on Trial: State Promises 'the Picture Will Be Clear' in 5-Year-Old Paitin Fields' Death

Notice what that opening did and did not do. It told the jury where to look. It did not tell the jury what the re-testing found. Prosecutors are allowed to hold things back in an opening, and plenty of good ones do. But this is a case where the defendant was named in 2018 and charged in 2022, and the State has staked its answer to "what changed" on testing done "after some advances in DNA technology." When the lab analysts take the stand, that phrase is the promise I will be measuring them against.

Luther Johnson Britt III, a former district attorney himself, stood up for the defense and opened right away. His client, he told the jury, did not hurt his niece. David had moved back into the house a few days earlier and was sleeping in a room the girls also used. On the morning of November 13 he was woken by his mother's screams. He got up still in the clothes he had worn the day and night before, found Paitin unresponsive, took her from his mother, and started pushing on her chest and breathing for her. 911 was called, Mr. Britt said, not once but twice. The two men decided not to wait for an ambulance, and David rode in the back seat holding her, trying to get her to respond.

She soiled herself on him during that drive, Mr. Britt said, and he kept holding her. He carried her in. The jury would see photographs of him in the waiting room afterward, pacing, sitting, head in his hands. While he waited he went into the restroom and tried to wash the stains off his clothes. He did not change them. The sheriff's office later took them and tested them.

And that, according to the defense, is where this case began and where it stayed. What the lab found on David's clothes, Mr. Britt said, was a mixture of his DNA and Paitin's, on the outside of his pants, on the inside where it had soaked through, and on his underwear. He told the jury that is exactly what you would expect from a man who held a child in that condition in the back of a car. "David immediately became the only suspect that the Pender County Sheriff's Department looked at," he said. "The only one."

He made a claim about the exam kit that the jury should hold the State to answering: that the swabs from Paitin's own medical exam held only a minute amount of unknown DNA that no one could identify as David's or anyone's, and no male DNA at all. That is his characterization. The lab witnesses have not testified. But if it holds up, it is a fact the State has to explain.

He walked the jury through the years. David was interviewed several times. There were searches. He was never arrested back then, and the case went cold. The original investigator, Detective John Leatherwood, left the sheriff's office. A newer detective reviewed the case, and in 2022 the sheriff's office decided it had enough to charge. "They have no more evidence today than they had in the beginning of this investigation," Mr. Britt told the jury. He called his client "the victim of a witch hunt."

On the earbuds, the defense's account is simple. David used them for music, and Paitin played with them, so of course both of their DNA is on them. Mr. Britt said most of it sits on the earpieces, the part that goes in your ear, with very little on the stretch of cord between them. He also told the jury that the doctor who performed the autopsy believed other items found in the house were a likelier fit than the earbuds, and that as the case dragged on, the detective who reopened it kept sending things back to the labs and back to that doctor, asking the same thing. "Could this be it?"

Then he went to Paitin's sister, and this is the part of his opening I expect the whole trial to turn on. She was interviewed by a forensic interviewer in 2017, he said, and described Paitin as acting funny, maybe having a seizure, and said nothing about David. She was interviewed again in 2018 and again said nothing about him. Only later, after Social Services moved her out of that house and placed her with an aunt, did she ever say anything about her uncle. And three weeks before trial, Mr. Britt said, during a practice session in that same courtroom, the prosecution had to ask the aunt to leave, because every time the girl was asked a question she looked to the back of the room to make sure she was saying what her aunt wanted. "She had been coached," he said, and said it twice.

He finished where he began. In the end, he told the jurors, the picture would be "just as cloudy as it was in 2017," and he would ask them to find David Prevatte not guilty "because the evidence simply is not there."

WATCH: THE DEFENSE OPENING (CLIP), LIVE 12:30 PM ET FRIDAY, OCT 2 Uncle on Trial: Defense Calls the Picture 'Just as Cloudy as It Was in 2017' in Paitin Fields' Death

Same rule for the defense. Every one of those statements is a promise, not evidence. The coaching claim is a serious one, made in open court about a living child, and Mr. Britt now owes this jury proof of it, the same way the State owes it proof of the re-testing. Her name stays off everything we write. She was seven that night, and whatever happened in that practice session, she did not choose to be at the center of this.

WATCH: DAY 1, CASE STORY PART 4 (BOTH OPENINGS AND THE PENDER ER STAFF) Uncle on Trial Opens on Re-Tested DNA vs No New Evidence as Paitin Fields' ER Staff Testify | Pt 4

I recorded my own reaction right after the openings, and I will tell you plainly where I came down, because I would rather you know my lean than guess at it. From what was said in that courtroom, I think nothing has changed between 2017 and 2022. In my opinion, this case should never have been charged. That is my opinion. It is not the jury's, it is not a verdict, and the State still has its lab witnesses to come. If the lab shows me something that changes my mind, I will come back and say so.

JUSTICE'S COMMENTARY: CASE STORY PART 2 Justice Speaks: Why He Says Nothing Changed Before the Uncle on Trial Was Charged | Pt 2

At the lunch break I took your questions, and the one most of you asked was the one the defense opening raised: was anyone besides the uncle ever a suspect? I walked through what the record and the public reporting show, and what they don't.

JUSTICE'S COMMENTARY: CASE STORY PART 3 (YOUR QUESTIONS) Was Anyone but the Uncle on Trial Ever a Suspect in Paitin Fields' Death? | Pt 3

Eleven beds and a camera on the ambulance door

The State's first witness was Krystal Beck, a registered nurse since 2010, most of that time in emergency rooms. In November 2017 she was one of two night nurses at the Pender emergency room in Burgaw. She gave the jury the size of the place, and it matters for picturing that night: eleven beds, two trauma bays, one doctor on overnight, and a camera on the ambulance door.

Shortly before four in the morning, she said, someone banged on that door. On the camera they saw two men, one holding a child who was not responding. They let them in and took the child straight to a trauma room, and in a facility that small, everyone ended up in the room at once. The little girl was limp and wearing only soiled underwear. They learned her name was Paitin Fields and that she was five.

At first, Ms. Beck said, she saw no injuries. Then, with Paitin on the bed and the team around her, she looked up at the doctor at the head of the bed, looked back down, and saw the marks on Paitin's neck. The first job was keeping Paitin alive: an IV, blood drawn, vital signs, and a breathing tube, so she could be stabilized for transfer to New Hanover Regional in Wilmington, which had the pediatric intensive care unit Pender did not.

The State played the emergency room's own video of the ambulance entrance, with the defense's agreement, and Ms. Beck identified the young man on it as the one who carried Paitin in. Because of what she saw on Paitin's neck, she told the jury, she was required by law to report it, and in the middle of the night that meant calling 911 to reach child protective services. The jury heard that call, too, admitted without objection. Her chart, read aloud, described a pinpoint rash over Paitin's face and neck.

Then the State did something it would do with nearly every witness of the day. It asked about routine hospital care. Ms. Beck explained how she took the one urine sample she collected, with a quick in-and-out catheter, a soft tube about as thin as pencil lead, and how a nurse takes a young child's temperature with a small probe. Could that care have injured Paitin? Unlikely, she said.

On cross-examination, Mr. Britt went to two things. The first was the underwear. It was the only thing Paitin had on, Ms. Beck agreed, and it was soiled and wet. She believed it was bagged and sent with Paitin to New Hanover, though she was not sure her notes recorded that. The second was the young man. How did he carry Paitin in? "Frantically," she said, because the child was not breathing.

WATCH: KRYSTAL BECK'S WHOLE TESTIMONY, LIVE 11:10 AM ET FRIDAY, OCT 2 The ER Nurse Who Called 911 for Paitin Fields: Krystal Beck's Entire Uncle on Trial Testimony

Britton Prosser is now the charge nurse in that emergency department. That night she was a staff nurse. Around 3:40, she said, dispatch called to warn them a child was on the way who had possibly had a seizure, and they got the resuscitation room ready. On the camera she saw him running up with the child in his arms. Ms. Beck opened the door. "Where do we go?" he asked. Ms. Prosser pointed him to the cardiac room, and he laid Paitin on the stretcher.

He did not let go at first. "I need you to let go so we can take care of her," she told him. He did, stepped back, and walked out, and security showed him where to wait. As soon as he set Paitin down, Ms. Prosser said, she saw the mark on her neck. She looked up at the doctor, who said, "We all see it, we're gonna take care of her."

Mr. Britt's cross was one real question. Did the man who brought Paitin in seem visibly upset? "Yes," she said.

WATCH: THE ER NURSE WHO TOLD HIM TO LET GO (CLIP), LIVE 2:30 PM ET FRIDAY, OCT 2 Uncle on Trial: ER Nurse Testifies She Told the Man Holding Paitin Fields 'I Need You to Let Go'

The third witness, Carolyn Flowers, has been a technician in that emergency department for nine years. She took Paitin's vital signs. The records showed one temperature in her name taken under the arm and a later one taken with a probe. She did not remember the second, but said that if the record shows it, she probably went back and did it, with so much going on that night. She described the method and said that done that way it would not have hurt Paitin. The defense had no questions.

Step back and look at what the State just did with its first three witnesses. Two of them gave the defense the picture it wanted: a young man running to the door with a child in his arms, carrying her in "frantically," not wanting to let go, visibly upset. Those are the State's own witnesses, and Mr. Britt barely had to ask. At the same time, all three were walked through catheters and thermometers. Nobody in either opening argued that hospital care caused Paitin's injuries. The State is closing that door before the defense has tried to open it, and it kept closing it all day, with every medical witness who followed. That tells you the State expects the argument and wants it dead before the defense case begins.

And there is one thread from the first witness I don't want dropped. The underwear Paitin was carried in was the only thing she was wearing. The night nurse believes it was bagged and sent on to Wilmington, and is not sure her notes say so. If it was collected and tested, this jury should hear the result. If it was lost somewhere between Burgaw and Wilmington, this jury should hear that too.

The doctors: certain about how

The State's fourth witness was the doctor at the head of that bed, Dr. Brian McGrath, an emergency physician licensed in North Carolina since 2015 and a former Army doctor who served in Afghanistan. He has been board certified in emergency medicine for years and teaches residents for the UNC School of Medicine. He was working nights at Pender Memorial in November 2017.

"I remember the night very clearly," he said. It started with a bang on the door. Paitin was barely responsive and struggling to breathe, and she was seizing, though not the thrashing kind of seizure people know from television. Her eyes twitched. Her arms and legs made small movements she was not controlling. Her upper body turned inward in what doctors call posturing, which he told the jury is a sign of a serious brain injury. "This was a profoundly sick girl," he said. "She was critically ill. She was dying."

He read the jury his own note from that night, which he called the most accurate account he has. It recorded that the patient's uncle had been banging on the back door with her, that she was limp and seizing, that she had soiled herself, and that he noticed a pinpoint rash on her face and neck right away. The note also recorded what the family told him once they arrived. Paitin had had cold symptoms for several days and had been given ibuprofen and a children's cold medicine at bedtime. The family said they woke about an hour before reaching the emergency room, because the television was on, and found her seizing. The history came from the uncle and the grandparents.

Hold that note in your head. It matters later, when we get to the clocks.

His team gave Paitin seizure medicine, placed a line into the bone of her leg when an IV would not take, put in a breathing tube, and ran a broad workup. He gave her antibiotics too, in case this was a serious infection, and explained to the jury why a careful doctor covers every possibility before settling on one. Good medicine, he said, means being "both confident and tremendously humble in recognizing where uncertainty exists." Then he told the jury he has been doing this for twenty years, that he has "probably seen 70,000 patients," and that in his opinion what happened to Paitin was no accident. No disease and no infection, he said, causes what he saw together with that devastating brain injury.

The judge admitted photographs of Paitin's face and neck from that night as illustrations of his testimony, and at the State's request ordered them kept off the broadcast. Dr. McGrath stepped down with a pointer and walked the jury through them. Asked whether he believed that night that she would live, he said, "I prayed that she would survive."

The cross-examination was short, and it is the most important few minutes of his testimony. Mr. Britt asked whether he had formed any opinion about what made the mark on Paitin's neck. He had not. He said he had no "insight or evidence" about what caused it. Mr. Britt then had him list the workup, the brain scan, the chest X-ray, the urine tests and the drug screen, the bloodwork, the cultures, because with so little information that night, the doctor said, "we didn't want to leave any stone unturned."

That is a careful doctor, and his answer on cross was an honest one. But it draws the line this whole day ran along. The State's medical witnesses can tell a jury what happened to a body. They cannot tell it who was holding anything, and the ER doctor told the jury in plain terms that the question of what made that mark was beyond him.

WATCH: DR. BRIAN MCGRATH'S WHOLE TESTIMONY, LIVE 1:10 PM ET FRIDAY, OCT 2 The Uncle on Trial: Paitin Fields' ER Doctor Who Prayed She Would Survive, Full Testimony

Next came Dr. Michael Stoiko, who spent about forty years as a pediatric critical care doctor and ran the pediatric ICU at New Hanover Regional, now a Novant hospital, for twelve years. He told the jury he has "testified in almost a hundred cases of child abuse," and the defense did not object when the State asked to have him accepted as an expert.

He took Dr. McGrath's call that night. The weather was too bad for the helicopter, so Paitin came by ground and reached his unit around 6:20 or 6:30 in the morning. She did not open her eyes, did not move on her own, did not pull away from a pinch. A machine was breathing for her. He saw the marks on her face and neck. He said he had very little information about how she was found, but from what he could see, he concluded it was intentional. "Somebody did this to her."

The State asked about children who are pulled from a pool unconscious and come back. He has treated many of them, he said, and the ones who recover usually start right away. Paitin showed no improvement at all, only decline. Was she one of those children who looks brain injured and then recovers? "Not even close," he said.

Her brain function failed in front of his team over the next day. Her brain death was confirmed through a careful protocol he wrote himself, with a second, independent exam by a pediatric neurologist, and it was confirmed on November 15. Her family, he said, chose to donate her organs. I want that on the record in a piece like this. In the worst week of their lives, the people who loved Paitin made a choice that helped other families, and no part of this trial should make us forget that.

WATCH: DAY 1, CASE STORY PART 5 (THE ER DOCTOR AND THE ICU DOCTOR) Paitin Fields' ER and ICU Doctors Tell the Uncle on Trial Jury Her Injuries Were No Accident | Pt 5

Now the cross, because this is where Day 1 gave the jury something the State did not put there. Mr. Britt asked Dr. Stoiko whether the sheriff's office had interviewed him. Yes. Had they asked him what kind of object might have made the mark on Paitin's neck? Not specifically, he said. And then: "I was not given any details about what was or wasn't at the crime scene." Had anyone ever suggested an object to him? No.

Sit with that for a second. This doctor ran the unit that cared for Paitin until her death. He has testified in close to a hundred child abuse cases. He was accepted in that courtroom as an expert. And in an investigation that ran more than four years before anyone was charged, the record so far shows the sheriff's office never put the question to him of what made the mark, and never told him what was found in that house.

Now put that next to the defense opening. Mr. Britt told the jury that the detective who reopened the case kept sending items to the labs and to the autopsy doctor asking, "Could this be it?" If both of those things are true, the investigation looks like this: the doctor who treated her for two days was never asked about an object, and the doctor who did the autopsy was asked about one item again and again. That is an investigation that may have picked its object first. I am not saying that is what happened. I am saying the record on Day 1 raises it, and the State's detectives will have to answer it when they take the stand. The autopsy doctor has not testified yet either, and when she does, the jury deserves to hear exactly what she was sent, when, and what she said back.

WATCH: THE ICU DOCTOR (CLIP), LIVE 4:30 PM ET FRIDAY, OCT 2 Uncle on Trial: ICU Doctor Says Paitin Fields Was 'Not Even Close' to the Patients Who Recover WATCH: DR. MICHAEL STOIKO'S WHOLE TESTIMONY, LIVE 3:10 PM ET FRIDAY, OCT 2 The Uncle on Trial: 'Somebody Did This to Her' Paitin Fields' ICU Doctor's Entire Testimony

Two clocks, and they are not the same width

After lunch, the State asked Dr. Stoiko the question that ties the medicine to the people in that house: when did this happen?

His answer was narrow. An injury to the brain that severe means she would never have woken up and would never have looked normal to anyone. By the time she reached the Pender emergency room she was dying, and that put the injury at "a period of maybe an hour," maybe longer, "but not much." Then he went further. "There's no way this happened earlier in the evening, and then she suddenly deteriorated at three o'clock in the morning."

That clock fits the State's story. Paitin arrived at 3:50. The State says her sister saw their uncle by the couch around three. The ER doctor's note says the family woke about an hour before they reached the hospital and found her seizing. An hour, maybe a bit more. Everything lines up.

Then Jessica McAlear took the stand, the nurse examiner from New Hanover Regional who examined Paitin in the ICU that morning. Her examination covered the injuries tied to the other charges in this case. The State asked her the same question. When did those injuries happen?

"That's a tough question," she said. She called them acute, and explained that there is not much research on how quickly these injuries heal in young children. "I can't tell you exactly when the injuries occurred, but they appeared to me to be acute, meaning within a day or two." Could it be within several hours? Absolutely, she said. Her best estimate was "any time from right before she entered the PICU to a day or two."

The second nurse examiner, Colleen Mistovich, was asked the same thing as the last witness of Day 1. "You can never date or time the healing of a wound," she said. What she could say was that "they appeared like they were new."

So the jury now has two clocks. The doctor's clock, for the injury that took her life, is about an hour wide. The nurse examiners' clock, for the other injuries, runs from just before she reached the ICU back as far as a day or two. A day or two before Paitin reached Wilmington reaches back across the whole weekend the State itself described in its opening: a family trip to see relatives on Saturday, a friend in the yard on Sunday afternoon, the evening hours before David came home.

I want to be careful here, because this is exactly the kind of point that gets twisted. I am not suggesting anyone else hurt Paitin. Nothing in the record on Day 1 points to anyone else, and I won't invent something that isn't there. What I am saying is that the State's theory puts everything in one room, in one stretch of minutes, by one person. The medical testimony on Day 1 supports that for the injury that took her life. For the other charges, the witnesses who examined her could not narrow the window that far, and they said so under oath. Closing that gap is the State's burden. The defense does not have to prove a thing.

A nurse examiner and a box of envelopes

Jessica McAlear has worked at New Hanover Regional since 2006, mostly in the emergency department, and now trains its emergency staff. She took the nurse examiner training for adults in 2008 and for children in 2012, and she estimated she has examined three to five hundred patients, fifty to a hundred of them children. She was called up to the ICU around 7:30 that morning. She had never met Paitin. She examined her head to toe, documented and photographed what she found, and collected the evidence kit.

She did not work alone, and she explained why. "This was unusual because of the extent of her injuries and the fact that she had a breathing tube, so that's why I asked for assistance." A child that age is normally examined by moving her into positions, and Paitin could not be moved. So she called in a colleague.

The State put her report and her diagrams in front of the jury, and then her photographs, admitted with no objection and again kept off the broadcast. She walked the jurors through what she documented. In her opinion, she told them, what she found was consistent with what the other charges in this case describe. Could she say what caused it? She could not, and she said she had not been there. Asked about the routine care Paitin received, the catheter and the temperature probe, she said that in twenty-five years of nursing she had never seen either cause injuries like these. Last, the State asked whether she had ever met David Prevatte. She had not.

Then she opened the box. The evidence kit, State's Exhibit 13, still carried her signature where she handed it over to police. Inside: a card with Paitin's blood as her known DNA sample, swabs she collected from Paitin's body, and two envelopes I want every one of you to remember. Part of the exam is scanning the body with an alternate light, a kind of ultraviolet that can make bodily fluids glow. When she scanned Paitin, she said, "both ears illuminated." She swabbed both ears. What was on those swabs, she told the jury, she does not know. That is for the lab.

WATCH: DAY 1, CASE STORY PART 6 (THE ICU DOCTOR AND THE NURSE EXAMINER DATE HER INJURIES) Uncle on Trial Jury Hears Paitin Fields' ICU Doctor and Nurse Examiner Date Her Injuries | Pt 6

Mr. Britt's cross did not go after her findings. It went after her experience and her tools, and that tells you something about where the defense thinks this case will be won or lost. How many examinations had she done on a child Paitin's age? About ten, she said. And how many of those children were on a breathing tube and unconscious? "She was the only one."

He asked about a colposcope, the magnifying camera instrument examiners can use to see small injuries up close without touching the patient. She knew it, had trained with it, and did not use one on Paitin. Her photographs were taken on an iPhone her program used, uploaded straight into the medical record. He also got her to agree that Paitin had been cleaned at the first hospital before she arrived, and that cleaning can sometimes remove evidence.

On redirect, the State came back to the colposcope. Could she see the injuries without one? Yes. "We can see just as well with the magnification from the iPhone camera as with the colposcope," she said, and her program had concluded that before 2017.

I don't think that exchange decides anything by itself. But it is fair to notice it. The jury heard from an experienced nurse who had done roughly ten exams on a child Paitin's age, never one on a child in Paitin's condition, and who did not use the magnifying instrument she was trained on. The State's answer is that it was not needed. The jury gets to weigh both, and it should know both.

WATCH: JESSICA MCALEAR'S WHOLE TESTIMONY, LIVE 5:10 PM ET FRIDAY, OCT 2 Uncle on Trial: Nurse Examiner Called to Paitin Fields' ICU Bed, Jessica McAlear's Full Testimony

The second opinion that came from the same program

The last witness of the day was the colleague Ms. McAlear called upstairs. Colleen Mistovich now manages the New Hanover emergency department. In 2017 she coordinated the hospital's nurse examiner program, which, she told the jury, she and Ms. McAlear started together around 2009. She has done well over fifteen hundred examinations in thirty-three years of nursing, at least two hundred on children Paitin's age.

She helped photograph Paitin on the 13th and came back the next morning. She remembered small blisters on the palm of one hand, swelling she believed was behind one ear, and a mark on the sole of a foot. To go through the other injuries, the State handed her Ms. McAlear's report to refresh her memory, and she read through the findings in agreement. She said the two of them sat down together afterward with the photographs to compare what each had seen, and she agreed with every injury Ms. McAlear recorded. Her opinion matched her colleague's. Routine cleaning, a thermometer, a catheter: none of them, she said, causes injuries like these.

I want to raise a question here, and I mean it as a question. The State presented Ms. Mistovich as a second expert. She is plainly experienced. But she is the co-founder of the same program, she was called in by the first examiner, she refreshed her memory from the first examiner's report, and she sat down with the first examiner to compare notes. Is that a second look, or the same look twice? Juries are told to weigh an expert's opinion like any other evidence. Part of weighing it is knowing how independent it is.

Then came the second box. On the 14th, Ms. Mistovich took Paitin's fingernail clippings and swabbed under each nail, a separate envelope for every finger, in a second State Crime Lab kit marked State's Exhibit 21. Its chain of custody shows it went from her to Detective Leatherwood on November 15, 2017, at ten in the morning. There was one more envelope in it, a swab from the back of Paitin's left foot. She did not remember why she took it, but said her practice was to swab anything that glowed under the light.

Mr. Britt's cross was short and stayed on those fingernails. Why swab under them? Because, she explained, if someone was fighting off an attacker and scratched them, "we may be able to find DNA underneath there."

WATCH: DAY 1, CASE STORY PART 7 (TWO NURSE EXAMINERS CLOSE THE DAY) Two Nurse Examiners Tell the Uncle on Trial Jury Hospital Care Didn't Injure Paitin Fields | Pt 7 WATCH: COLLEEN MISTOVICH'S WHOLE TESTIMONY, LIVE 6:10 PM ET FRIDAY, OCT 2 The Uncle on Trial: Second Nurse Examiner Says Paitin Fields' Wounds Looked New in Full Testimony

Everything they swabbed, and nothing they've reported

Here is the list I walked out of Day 1 with. This is every item the jury now knows was collected, and it is the list that decides whether this trial ever gets from "how" to "who."

David's clothes, which the defense says carried a mixture of his DNA and Paitin's, explained by the drive to the hospital. The swabs in Paitin's evidence kit, which the defense says carried only a minute amount of unknown DNA and no male DNA. A swab taken from David's body, one of the State's three named items. The red earbuds, the State's third. The underwear she was carried in, which the night nurse believes was bagged. The swabs from both of her ears, which glowed under the light. The clippings and swabs from under every one of her fingernails, handed to the original detective two days after she came in. A swab from the back of her foot.

Not one result for any of those items came into evidence on Day 1. That is not a criticism of the State's order of proof. Prosecutors build a case the way they want, and starting with the medicine is a normal way to do it. But when the State told this jury what to watch, it named three of those items. The jury now knows about at least five more. If any of them came back pointing somewhere, the State will tell us. If any of them came back with nothing, or with someone the jury hasn't heard about, this jury deserves to hear that too, and so do you.

That is the standard I hold this case to. We are not here only to show you what the jury saw. We are here to show you what the jury should see, and to ask out loud what it isn't being shown. On Day 1, the open question is simple. Ears that glowed. Fingernails swabbed for DNA. Nine years of testing. What came back?

What the jury saw that you didn't

Three times on Day 1, the judge admitted photographs of Paitin and, at the State's request, ordered them kept off the broadcast. Before lunch, with the jury out, the prosecutor told the judge that the camera faced the courtroom TV and some images had been picked up anyway; someone had texted one of her staff to say they could see them. She asked again that they be kept off. Our own copies of that stretch are covered.

I agree with that ruling, and I want to say why, because on this channel I question rulings when they deserve it. This one doesn't. Paitin was a little girl. Those photographs were taken while doctors and nurses were trying to save her life and document what was done to her. The jury needs them to decide this case. The public doesn't need them to understand it. Her family should never have to come across them on someone's phone.

But you should know that the jury has seen them, because it explains the weight in that room that a transcript can't carry. When you read that a witness stepped down with a pointer and walked twelve people through a photograph, understand that twelve people looked at that photograph for a long time.

The other thing worth knowing about the rulings on Day 1 is how few there were. The emergency room video came in by agreement. The 911 call came in without objection. The hospital records came in without objection. Every expert the State offered was accepted, and I did not hear the defense object to one of them. The judge said at the close of the day that there had been one bench conference, and put on the record what it was about: whether Mr. Britt wanted to do his cross-examination of the last witness before the jury went home. He did. He said it would not take long, and it didn't.

That is a choice, and it is a revealing one. The defense is not fighting the State on what happened to Paitin. It barely questioned the doctors on their conclusions. It is saving everything for the fight over who, which means the lab, the investigation, and Paitin's sister. When those witnesses arrive, expect the objections to start.

What changed? Still waiting

So let me come back to the question I started with, because Day 1 brought us to the edge of it without answering it.

David Prevatte was named a suspect in 2018. He was charged in 2022. The defense told the jury that what happened in between was a newer detective reviewing the file and a lab being asked, over and over, "Could this be it?" The State told the jury that what happened in between was evidence "tested later on after some advances in DNA technology." Both of those are promises. Neither one was kept or broken on Day 1, because neither side has put on its lab witnesses yet.

And then there is the sister. In the State's account, she is the only person who saw David Prevatte near Paitin that night. The State says she saw him by the couch. The defense says she said nothing about him in two interviews in 2017 and 2018, only spoke about him after she moved in with an aunt the defense calls biased against him, and was steered by that aunt at a practice session three weeks before trial. The jury will hear those recorded interviews. It will see her testify. And it will be up to those twelve people, not me, to decide what to make of a child's account given years later, against a child's silence given at the time.

I'll say only this. A claim that a child was coached is about as serious as a claim gets in a case like this, and Mr. Britt made it in his opening, twice, in front of the jury. The State has not answered it in court yet. When it does, I'll be watching exactly how.

Where Day 1 leaves the uncle on trial

Here is my honest read of the day. The State proved, through its own witnesses and without much of a fight, that something terrible was done to a five-year-old girl in the hours before she was carried through that ambulance door. That was never going to be the hard part of this case, and the defense never really contested it. The hard part is who, and Day 1 didn't try to prove who. It laid the medical foundation the State needs before the people from that house, the detectives, and the lab can take the stand.

What I'll be watching for, starting with Day 2:

Whether the lab analysts tell the jury, in plain words, what the re-testing found that the original testing didn't. Whether anyone tested the swabs from Paitin's ears and the clippings from under her nails, and what came back. Whether the underwear she was carried in was ever tested. Whether the detectives explain why the ICU doctor was never asked what made that mark. What the autopsy doctor was sent, and what she said about it. How the State squares a one-hour window with a window of a day or two. And how it answers the claim that Paitin's sister was coached.

If you want the whole day with nothing cut but the recesses, it's here:

WATCH: DAY 1, NO BREAKS EDITION (THE FULL COURT DAY) The Uncle on Trial Day 1, No Breaks Edition: Both Openings and Seven Medical Witnesses

If you want the five moments that carry the day:

WATCH: DAY 1 TOP MOMENTS The Uncle on Trial: David Prevatte Day 1 Top Moments | 'Witch Hunt' or Evidence That Speaks for Her

The full live broadcast, with our commentary as it happened, is still up:

WATCH: DAY 1 LIVE BROADCAST LIVE: The Uncle on Trial - NC v. David Prevatte - Opening Statements

And when court let out, I sat down and recorded my reflection on the day, built around the same two questions this piece ends on: what did the new testing show, and what does this jury do with the claim that Paitin's sister was coached.

JUSTICE'S DAY 1 REFLECTION Doctors Say Someone Did This to Paitin Fields but Who? Justice Reflects on Uncle on Trial Day 1

David Prevatte is presumed innocent. He doesn't have to prove anything, and the State has to prove everything, beyond a reasonable doubt, to twelve people who have now heard one day of it. And through all of it, Paitin Fields deserves what every witness on Day 1 was asked for and none of them could give: a real answer about who did this to her.