Inside That House, the State Asked Its Own Witness: 'Did You Cause Paitin's Death?'

Paitin Fields was five years old. On the night she was hurt, there were five people inside the family home in Pender County: Paitin, her seven-year-old sister Savannah, their grandmother Lisa Hunt, their grandfather Dale Hunt, and their uncle, David Prevatte, who was 19. One of those five is dead. One of them is on trial for her death. On Day 2, the State of North Carolina called the other two adults in that house, his own mother and the man who raised him, and asked them to tell the jury what happened inside that house.

They told it. Both of them told the jury the uncle on trial was the one breathing into Paitin's mouth on the way to the hospital. Both of them told the jury he loved those girls. And then, near the end of its own questioning of Dale Hunt, the State asked its own witness a question you do not often hear a prosecutor ask the people it calls: "Did you cause Paitin's death?"

"No, sir."

I want to talk about why that question got asked. But I want to put it next to the question this whole trial is sitting on, because Day 2 did nothing to answer that one either. David Prevatte was named a suspect in 2018. He was charged in 2022. The State told this jury in its opening that evidence was "tested later on after some advances in DNA technology." Two days and nine witnesses in, nobody has told the jury what changed between those two dates. On Day 2 the defense put a new date on the timeline, a February 2021 meeting at the sheriff's office with the district attorney himself, and the record still goes quiet after it.

So here is the day as I see it. The State spent the morning inside that house: the couch, the bedrooms, the dogs, the door, the clothes, the clock. The defense spent the same morning showing the jury a family that let the sheriff's office search whenever it asked, sat for interview after interview, and never once pointed a finger at their son. And the jury went home early for the weekend with sickness going around the courthouse, carrying two different clocks for the same night and a "No, sir" from the other man in the house.

One thing before any of it. David Prevatte has pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder and the other charges in this case. He is presumed innocent. The State gave notice on Feb. 9 that it will not seek the death penalty, as the StarNews reported this week. Nothing his mother or his stepfather said changes the presumption, and the jury has not yet heard a single lab witness. I will tell you what I think as I go, and I will tell you when it is my opinion.

A warning to the gallery before the first witness

The day opened with the judge speaking to the people watching, not the jury. "Ladies and gentlemen, I was informed this morning that there was an incident outside this courthouse." He did not say what happened, and I am not going to guess. He told the room that "being in this courtroom is a privilege," and that if anything happened again, inside the courtroom or outside it, those involved would not be allowed back in to watch.

Later in the morning, a few minutes into his mother's testimony, he stopped and warned the room again: "absolutely no commentary, no gasps, nothing from the audience while this witness is testifying."

I mention it because it tells you what that courtroom feels like. On Day 1 I called this a family split inside one house, and Day 2 is the day that split walked into the witness box. Paitin's mother was in the room. So was the defendant's. Every word the grandmother said about her son landed on people who loved the little girl he is accused of killing, and some of those people are her own children. The judge was protecting his jury from that room, and he was right to.

His mother, called by the State

The State's eighth witness was Lisa Hunt. She spelled her name for the court reporter, told the jury where the family lived in November 2017, and identified her son at the defense table by his yellow shirt. Asked whether Dale Hunt was David's father or stepfather, she gave the answer the whole family gave all day: "It's his stepfather, but he's his father. He's the only man that's raised him." Dale had raised him since he was about 18 months old.

The girls, Savannah and Paitin, were her granddaughters, her daughter's children. They lived with the Hunts so they could go to a school in Pender County she thought was better than the one back home in Robeson County. There was no Social Services placement. The family had agreed to it. She had had Paitin since Paitin was three.

The lead prosecutor, Shirley Smircic, took her through photographs first. State's Exhibits 22 and 23 were pictures of Paitin and of the two sisters together, admitted to show the jury what the girls looked like. Lisa Hunt corrected the State on the stand: those pictures were from when the girls were younger, she said, not seven and five. She was going to be that kind of witness all morning. She answered what she was asked, and when she thought a question had it wrong, she said so.

Then the weekend. "Paitin had been sick all weekend," she said. A bad cough. She had been with her mother on Friday and had played with a cousin who had hand, foot and mouth disease, so the family got her away from him. On Sunday Paitin fell asleep in a recliner at a beauty shop in the afternoon, which was unusual, because "Paitin was an active child" who did not take naps. That evening Paitin fell asleep in her grandparents' bed, and around nine or nine-thirty Lisa Hunt carried her out to the living room couch, where Savannah was already asleep. It was a big L-shaped couch, and the girls slept on it most nights by choice. On State's Exhibit 24, a photo of the living room, she marked an S where Savannah lay and a P where she put Paitin, the two of them head to head.

David came home around ten o'clock. He had been out with his cousin, Melissa Brown. His mother let him in, and asked whether she locked the door behind him, she said, "I believe I did." The girls were asleep on the couch. Paitin woke for a minute and laid her head back down. Lisa Hunt went back to bed beside her husband, who was already asleep.

Here is her account of what came next. Her husband got up to use the bathroom, and that woke her. The TV in the living room was loud, which was nothing unusual with two little girls in the house, so she got up to turn it down. "And I turned around and I seen Paitin on the couch seizing." She put it at about three in the morning. Paitin had moved to the other end of the couch, her head on the arm, her eyes "rolling in her head."

"What did you do when you saw Paitin?"

"I screamed."

Dale came out of their bedroom. David came out of the front bedroom, the one closest to the couch. And then the State asked a short question and moved on before the answer could carry anything:

"Was David dressed?"

"Yes."

"What about Dale?"

"Dale was in his pajamas."

Pay attention to how the State builds. It does not ask a witness what she thinks. It asks her a fact and lets the fact sit there for the jury to do the work. A 19-year-old fully dressed at three in the morning, next to a grandfather in his pajamas, is an image the State wants in the jurors' heads. It never told the jury, on its own direct examination, why he was dressed. The defense did that later, and I will get to it.

WATCH: CASE STORY PT 8, HIS MOTHER ON THE STAND, LIVE 8:00 PM ET FRIDAY, OCT 2 Uncle on Trial's Mother Breaks Down Over Her 911 Call for Paitin Fields With the Jury Out

She called 911 from the house phone, twice. Both times, she said, it told her it could not connect. "She had quit breathing and everybody was panicking," she said, and if you could not get 911, "you had to get her to the hospital somehow." So Dale drove and David held Paitin, giving her CPR. Then 911 called the house back, and she talked to them.

The State asked her directly whether Paitin had anything around her neck. "No, she did not." Did she notice anything about Paitin's face or neck? "No." Then she added something on her own, and she said it twice: "There was nothing." She said she has said that from the beginning.

Hold that answer up against Day 1. The two night nurses at the Pender emergency room saw marks on Paitin's neck within moments of laying her on the bed. One of them, Krystal Beck, also told the jury that at first she saw no injuries, and only noticed the marks when she looked back down. So I am not going to tell you the grandmother is wrong, and I am not going to tell you the nurses are wrong. A panicked woman in a living room at three in the morning and a trauma team under hospital lights are not looking at the same child in the same way. But the State's own witnesses now disagree on what was visible and when, and that gap belongs to the State's medical experts to explain. The doctor who performed the autopsy has not testified yet.

The 911 call, with the jury out of the room

Before the jury heard her 911 call, the State had to authenticate it, which means proving to the judge that the recording is what the State says it is. That happened with the jury sent out. The State marked the CD as State's Exhibit 25 and started to play it while she sat in the witness box.

She broke down almost immediately. The judge offered her a break. "I can continue," she said, and then: "It's got to be done." He asked the people in the gallery who were having a hard time to step out until they could compose themselves. Partway through, the judge asked the State a fair question: "Do we need to listen to the whole thing for authentication?"

When the State asked her whether the recording had been changed or altered in any way, she gave an answer I thought was one of the most honest of the day. "Not that I recall. I mean, that was a panic moment. I mean, how are you supposed to remember exactly word for word?"

The call was admitted without objection, and after the mid-morning break the jury came back in and heard it, played in its entirety for the record. On it, a grandmother tells the dispatcher that the men are already on the road to the hospital, that the little girl had been sick, that her eyes were going back in her head. There are lines on that recording that are hard to make out, and voices the recording does not identify. I am not going to put words in anybody's mouth from a recording that cannot tell me whose mouth they came out of. Listen to it yourself, and listen for what she says she saw: a seizure, a sick child, two men already driving.

WATCH: THE CLIP, HIS MOTHER AND THE 911 CALL Uncle on Trial: His Mother Recalls Finding Paitin Fields at 3 AM and the Jury Hears Her 911 Call

After the call, the State did something that looked small and is not. It put up State's Exhibits 26 through 29, photographs of the family's three dogs: a little one named Bubbles, a black dog named Smokey, and a bigger one named Sapphire. The dogs lived inside at night. Would they bark if someone came onto the property? "Sometimes, sometimes not," she said, because the neighborhood kids grew up hanging around that yard. Then the State walked her through the hospital's own lobby video, State's Exhibit 1, and she identified her son on it. "That's David." He was wearing, she said, what he had on when they found Paitin.

Put those together. On Day 1 the State spent its morning closing a door nobody had opened, walking every medical witness through catheters and thermometers so no one could later argue the hospital hurt Paitin. On Day 2 it spent its morning closing a different door: a locked front door, dogs in the house, nobody else inside. The State is building a case where only the people in that house could have done this. That is a legitimate thing for a prosecutor to build. But notice what that leaves the State standing on so far: two adults who say they saw nothing done to her, a sister who has not testified yet, and a little girl who cannot speak for herself.

What the defense wanted from his mother

Luther Johnson Britt III, for the defense, did not attack Lisa Hunt. He did not need to. He used her to paint the house the defense wants the jury to see, and she gave him every color he asked for.

The girls loved their uncle. "They loved their Uncle David, the Uncle Boo-Boo, as they called him," she said. It was the nickname Dale gave David when he was a toddler, and the girls grew up hearing it. The front bedroom, where David slept when he was home, was also the girls' playroom, full of their toys and a dollhouse. When David came back, the room "stayed the same."

Then the laundry. For the six weeks before that night she had been traveling with her own mother, and the dirty clothes ended up wherever they ended up, and the dogs pulled them around. Did that mean David's clothes and the girls' clothes got mixed together?

"Everybody's got intermingled, yes, sir."

If you followed Day 1, you know exactly why Mr. Britt wanted that sentence. His opening told the jury that the DNA the lab found on David's clothes was a mix of his and Paitin's, and that it is exactly what you would expect in a house like this one, and from a man who held a sick child in a car. A house where everyone's clothes got mixed, where the girls played in the uncle's room and slept on the couch everybody napped on, is a house where finding two family members' DNA on the same things tells you very little. That is the defense's theory of the DNA, and Day 2 is where it got its foundation.

Next came the clothes he was wearing. Why was David dressed at three in the morning? "David was bad for sleeping in his clothes so he could get up and be ready for work the next morning if he overslept," his mother said. He came home, lay across the bed, and went to sleep in what he had on, an orange T-shirt and khaki-colored pants, the same clothes on the hospital video. That is the answer to the State's "Was David dressed?" The State asked the question. The defense supplied the context. Whether the jury believes it is up to the jury, but the jury now has both halves.

He went to the couch and the dogs. Paitin was a restless sleeper, she said, and it was not unusual to put her down at one end and find her at the other. When Lisa Hunt came out, Bubbles was lying above Paitin's head on the arm of the couch, the way the little dog usually slept beside her. Smokey was David's dog and slept wherever David slept, and Smokey came out of the bedroom with David that morning. David's bedroom door was off its hinges, leaned shut, too heavy for the girls to move. The defense did not tell the jury why it wanted all of that on the record. My read: it is laying down the physical facts of that hallway before the State's detectives describe the house their way. Watch for the door again.

Then he took her to the moment that matters most to the defense. When she grabbed Paitin off the couch, who took her? "David." What did he do? He was crying and hollering for his father. He put his finger in her mouth, because her grandmother told him to hold her tongue down so she would not swallow it. He began breathing into her mouth, she said. "She turned purple." Whose idea was it to drive instead of wait for an ambulance? "David." He was the one telling his father to hurry: "Dad, hurry."

She also told the jury something about the hours after that I think the jury needs to sit with. At the second hospital, the pediatric unit in Wilmington, "No one ever talked to us," she said. Nobody came out to tell the family how Paitin was doing. She was not allowed to be around her granddaughter. The only person who came out was Detective John Leatherwood. He pulled her into a room by herself for ten or fifteen minutes.

I am not criticizing a hospital for protecting a child it believed had been hurt by someone at home. That is its job. But it tells you where this investigation stood within hours of Paitin reaching Wilmington. The family was not being treated as a family. On Day 1, Mr. Britt told the jury his client "immediately became the only suspect." The grandmother's account of that morning fits that.

The years nobody has explained

The last part of Mr. Britt's cross is the part I think the State most needs to answer, and it is about everything that happened after the morning of November 13.

The sheriff's office had already been to the house that morning, she said, while David and Dale were home. Did they have a warrant, or consent? "They had a search warrant, but they were also given consent to search. There was no problem with them searching." They came back multiple times. There was never any resistance. She, Dale and David were all called to the sheriff's office to be interviewed. How many times? "Many. I mean, honestly, many." More with Dale than with her, she said, "but mainly David."

There was no arrest made back then. And then the defense put a date on the record I had not heard before. The last time the family had contact with the sheriff's office before the arrest, she said, was a meeting in 2021, she believed in February. She, her husband and her daughter were called to the sheriff's office to meet with the district attorney at the time, Ben David, with Detective Leatherwood and the sheriff there. After that, "They had not been contacting us at all anymore."

Was Leatherwood still the investigator by the time of the arrest? "I do not know."

In 2022, David was arrested in Louisiana, where he had been working construction for two or three months. "I put him on the airplane," his mother said.

WATCH: CASE STORY PT 9, HIS MOTHER ON CROSS, THEN HIS STEPFATHER, LIVE 9:00 PM ET FRIDAY, OCT 2 His Mother and Stepfather Tell the Uncle on Trial Jury He Tried to Save Paitin Fields

Now lay out what the jury actually knows. A family that consented to searches. Interviews beyond counting. No arrest for years. A meeting with the elected district attorney himself in early 2021. Then silence from the sheriff's office. Then an arrest a state away, of a young man whose mother had put him on a plane to go work.

And here is what the jury does not know. It does not know why the district attorney sat down with this family in 2021, or what was said in that room. It does not know what happened between that meeting and the arrest. It does not know whether the detective who named David a suspect in 2018 was the one who charged him in 2022; on Day 1 the defense told the jury he was not, that a newer detective reviewed the case. It heard the State say in its opening that evidence was re-tested after advances in DNA technology, and it has not heard one word about what that re-testing found or when it came back.

I want to be careful. The defense is asking these questions for a reason, and its reason is to make the jury think nothing changed. That is advocacy, and the State has every right to answer it. But it has to answer it. A case that sat from a 2018 suspect to a 2022 charge needs a reason it moved, and "after some advances in DNA technology" is a promise in an opening statement, not evidence. The lab analysts are coming. So are the detectives. When they take the stand, the first thing I will be listening for is a date, and the second is a result.

The State had one short round of questions left for her, and it went somewhere I did not expect. Did the house have running water in November 2017? Yes, she said; one back bathroom had been sluggish from buildup, and her husband and David had replaced water lines at some point, but there was water in the kitchen and in her bathroom, where the girls took their baths. The State did not say why it asked. A prosecutor does not ask that question by accident. Something is coming that makes the plumbing matter, and I will tell you what it is when the State shows us.

She was released subject to recall, which means either side can bring her back.

The man who raised him

The State's ninth witness was Dale Hunt, and the second prosecutor, Mr. Smith, handled him. If Lisa Hunt was careful, Dale Hunt was raw.

Asked whether he was David's stepfather, he did not let the word stand. "I'm his father," he said, and said it again. He had raised David since before he could walk. "That's my son." When he added that David is going to get his name changed to Hunt, the judge had to quiet the courtroom.

The State walked him through his life in 2017. He worked for Smithfield, loading hogs and then working on a farm. He had torn up his knee and been out of work for about three months, and had been back for only about a week. He had that weekend off. The whole family, David included, had driven to Lumberton so Dale could put safety rails up for his mother-in-law after her knee surgery. Monday morning he was due back at the farm at 5:30, so he went to bed early Sunday, around eight or nine.

When he went to bed, he said, David was not inside. He was outside with some friends at a bonfire in the yard, kids Dale let hang out at the house because that way he knew they were safe. Notice that this is not quite how Lisa Hunt described David's evening. She told the jury he had been out with his cousin and came home around ten. Both can be true; Dale was asleep by nine, and nothing in his account covers what David did after that. But the jury now has two versions of the uncle's Sunday evening from the two adults in the house, and the three people the State said in its opening spent that evening with him have not testified yet.

Then the night. He woke up to use the bathroom. On the way back, he said, he looked through the doorway into the living room and saw Savannah sitting up and Paitin lying down. He thought Paitin was asleep, and went back to bed. A few minutes later Savannah came into the bedroom and told him Paitin was acting silly. He thought the girls were playing. He told her to go back to bed and not to wake her sister.

"And see, that's why I blame myself."

Mr. Smith stopped him there, gently, and told him to just answer the questions. But you cannot unhear that sentence, and the jury did not. A grandfather who was told something was wrong with the baby, and sent the messenger back to bed.

About thirty minutes later, give or take, his wife got up to make his coffee, and that is when he heard her scream his name. She was holding Paitin. "Something ain't right." He went to get dressed. David came out. 911 did not answer. "So that's when we came up with the idea, let's jump in the car and get there," because by the time an ambulance reached their part of Pender County and turned around, he said, he could already be at the hospital.

He drove his maroon Kia. Who had Paitin? "Boo-Boo," he said, and then apologized and called him David. David got in the front seat holding her. And Dale drove "wide open" down Highway 117.

How long did it take? "Probably about four or five minutes." The prosecutor pointed out that Lisa Hunt had said about fifteen. Dale did not budge: "You can ask Leatherwood, because Leatherwood timed it." The detective had asked him how he got there so fast. He asked the detective whether he could go to jail for answering. Told no, he said: "I averaged out about 120, topped out at 160." He kept his eyes on the road. He could smell when Paitin soiled herself, he said, "and that's when I really punched it."

At the hospital, David jumped out and banged on the ambulance door, the same moment the jury watched on video on Day 1. Dale moved the car out of the ambulance lane, parked, and came in through the front. Later, at the hospital in Wilmington, he said security kept the family away from Paitin and told him he had to wait for a police officer before he could see her. He told the guard the officer had five more minutes. Detective Leatherwood came about ten minutes later.

Two clocks inside one house

On Day 1 I wrote about two clocks: the doctor who put the injury that took Paitin's life within about an hour of her arrival, and the nurse examiners who could only date the other injuries to somewhere within a day or two. Day 2 added a third clock, and it runs inside the house itself.

The grandmother says the drive took fifteen or twenty minutes. The grandfather says four or five, and that the lead detective timed it. The Pender emergency room's night nurse told the jury on Day 1 that dispatch called ahead around 3:40, and the State told the jury Paitin was admitted at 3:50. The grandmother puts the moment she found Paitin at about three. The grandfather puts about thirty minutes between Savannah's warning and his wife's scream. The emergency room doctor's note from that night, read to the jury on Day 1, recorded that the family said they woke about an hour before reaching the hospital.

Those numbers do not have to agree perfectly for this case to make sense. Nobody looks at a clock while a child is seizing. But the State built its case on a tight window, and the tight window is the one the medicine supports. That makes the minutes matter. If Detective Leatherwood timed that drive, the jury is owed his number, the time of the 911 calls that would not connect, the time of the call back, and the time on the hospital's ambulance-door camera. Those are records. They do not panic and they do not forget. Dale Hunt told this jury, under oath, that the detective has the answer. When Leatherwood takes the stand, I want to hear it.

One small thing, and I am holding the defense to it the same way I hold the State. On Day 1, Mr. Britt told the jury David rode in the back seat holding Paitin. Both of his parents, on Day 2, put him in the front passenger seat; Dale was beside him and saw him giving her mouth-to-mouth. It probably changes nothing about the defense's DNA theory, since he was holding her either way. But an opening is a promise, and the defense's own witnesses corrected this one.

"Did you cause Paitin's death?"

Then Mr. Smith walked Dale Hunt back through the night one more time. Was there anybody else in the house? "Not at all." Did the dogs bark at people they did not know? Yes. Did he see anybody else in the house that night? No. Did he hear David come back in? No; once he is asleep, he is out. Did he go into the living room between going to bed and getting up for the bathroom? No, only the look through the doorway.

And then, near the end of the State's own questioning:

"Did you cause Paitin's death?"

"No, sir."

"Did you cause Paitin, any of Paitin's injuries?"

"No, sir."

He raised Paitin. He raised Savannah. They had Savannah since she was ten days old. "I spoiled my grandbabies."

Why does a prosecutor ask its own witness whether he killed the child?

Because there were two grown men in that house that night, and the State is only prosecuting one of them. The State knows the jury can count. It knows that sooner or later somebody on that jury is going to look at the man who was told the baby was acting silly and sent her sister back to bed, and wonder. So the State asked first, out loud, on direct, and got its denial on the record before the defense could do anything with the question.

And here is the part I need to say very carefully. I am not suggesting Dale Hunt did anything to Paitin. Nothing in the record says he did, the defense has not suggested it, and I will not invent what is not there. He loved that little girl, and you can hear it in every answer he gave.

But a denial is not an investigation. "No, sir" from a grieving grandfather is not the same thing as a detective explaining to a jury how the sheriff's office looked at every adult in that house and why it ruled each one in or out. If the State's case is that only someone inside could have done this, then the State owes the jury the work it did on everyone inside, the man it charged and everyone it did not. That is the question most of you asked me at the lunch break on Day 1: was anyone besides the uncle ever a suspect? Day 2 answered it with a question the State put to its own witness. The detectives still owe the real answer.

WATCH: DAY 2 TOP MOMENTS, PREMIERES 8:30 AM ET MONDAY, OCT 5 The Uncle on Trial: David Prevatte Day 2 Top Moments / His Mother and Stepfather Take the Stand

The cross, and the clothes

Mr. Britt's cross of Dale Hunt was short and warm. He started with a birthday: Dale and Savannah share one. "That's Papa's baby." How was David with the girls? "He loves his niece. He spoiled them just as much as I did." Uncle Boo-Boo again. Was David dressed when he came out? "Yes, sir. He usually sleeps with his clothes on." Same clothes as on the hospital video. Whose idea was it to drive? "I think it was my son's."

And the drive, from the driver's seat: "I remember looking over here and giving him mouth to mouth. He was giving her mouth to mouth." When Paitin lost control of her body, David said, "Daddy, let's go, and that's when I hit 160." When they got to the hospital, David's clothes were wet.

Then he said something I do not think either side planned for. The doctor at the Pender emergency room told the family Paitin was very sick and had to go to the pediatric unit in Wilmington, by ground ambulance, because the fog had grounded the helicopter. It took two and a half hours for the transfer ambulance to get there, Dale said, and during that time he drove David home so he could change his clothes. That is his account, and nobody from the transfer crew has testified to it.

Stop on that for a moment, because it connects three things the jury has now heard. On Day 1, the defense told the jury David tried to wash the stains off his clothes in the hospital restroom but did not change them, and that the sheriff's office later took those clothes and tested them. On Day 2, his father told the jury he drove David home that morning to change. And his mother told the jury that in that house, "Everybody's got intermingled." The sheriff's office came to the house with a search warrant that same morning.

So where did those clothes go when he took them off? Into the pile, onto the floor, into a bag? Who collected them, when, and from where? I do not know the answer, and neither does the jury yet. It matters in both directions. If the State is going to rely on what the lab found on those clothes, it has to show the jury exactly where they were between David's body and the evidence bag. And if the defense is going to say the DNA is innocent transfer from a mixed-up house, the same chain is the one it will be pointing at. Whoever collected those clothes is a witness I want to hear from.

At the hospital in Wilmington, Dale said, "they wouldn't let us have nothing to do with her." The family got as far as the parking lot. Leatherwood put him in an interview room, and he told the detective, "when she wakes up, she can tell you what in the world was going on." She never woke up. Was David upset? "Of course." Crying? Yes. "I was in the parking lot begging God to take my life," Dale said.

On redirect, Mr. Smith picked up on something Dale had said, that given things he had done in his life he did not deserve to live, and asked him what he meant. His answer is about his younger years, and it is not clear on the recording, so I am not going to quote it. Then the State asked its last question of the day: "Do you ever hurt children?"

"No."

He was released subject to recall.

Sent home early

Not long after, the judge sent the jury home for the weekend, hours early, with sickness going around; the clerk was not feeling well. He gave the jurors the standard instructions with extra care for a weekend: they will see more people than they did all week, those people will be curious, and the jurors have to tell them they cannot talk about it. If they pass any of the places mentioned in testimony, they may drive by, but they may not stop.

With the jury gone, the court put two things on the record. A juror had asked the bailiff whether the juror could ask him questions about the proceedings outside the courtroom, and the bailiff said no and told the judge right away. Neither side asked for anything more. That is the system working the way it should, on the record, in front of both parties. And because the court's session was running past the week it was scheduled for, the judge entered an order extending it. Court resumes Monday at 9:30 a.m.

WATCH: DAY 2, NO BREAKS EDITION, PREMIERES 7:00 PM ET FRIDAY, OCT 2 The Uncle on Trial Day 2, No Breaks Edition: His Mother, His Stepfather and the 911 Call WATCH: THE FULL DAY 2 LIVE BROADCAST, WITH LIVE COMMENTARY LIVE: The Uncle on Trial - NC v. David Prevatte - Day 2

What Monday owes this jury

Here is where I come down after Day 2, and this is my opinion.

The State got what it called these two witnesses to get. It has the house now: who was in it, where everyone slept, where the couch was, which door the uncle came out of, a locked front door and dogs inside. It has the uncle dressed and the grandfather in pajamas. It has the grandfather's denial on the record. Every one of those facts points the jury back into that house.

The defense got just as much from the same two people, and it barely had to raise its voice. Both of the adults who were there say David tried to save her. Both say he slept in his clothes. Both say he wanted to drive. His mother says the laundry was mixed, the room was shared, the family cooperated with every search, and the sheriff's office sat with them over and over and then went quiet after a meeting with the district attorney in 2021. Two of the State's own witnesses spent the morning describing a young man who was frantic to save his niece, and that is the same picture the State's own nurses gave on Day 1.

What neither side gave the jury on Day 2 is the thing this trial turns on. The State has now called nine witnesses, and not one of them has put David Prevatte's hands on Paitin. The medical witnesses said something was done to her. The family witnesses said they saw nothing done to her, and saw him trying to save her. The State's case lives or dies on what comes next: Paitin's sister, the three people the State says spent Sunday evening with David, the detectives, and the lab.

So here is my list for the State, in its own words, carried forward from Day 1 with Day 2 added:

The re-tested DNA its opening told the jury about, what it found, and when the result came back. The red earbuds it told the jury to watch for. Whatever made that February 2021 meeting with the district attorney happen, and whatever happened after it. Detective Leatherwood's timing of that drive, and the hard times on the 911 calls and the ambulance-door camera. How the clothes David changed out of were collected. And how the investigation looked at every adult who was inside that house, the one it charged and the ones it did not.

And for the defense: Mr. Britt told this jury that Savannah was coached. That is the most serious claim either side has made, about a living child, and he owes the jury proof of it when she testifies.

This weekend we are releasing Lisa Hunt's and Dale Hunt's whole testimonies, start to finish, so you can watch every answer for yourself, along with more key moments. And tonight I sit down with the day.

WATCH: JUSTICE REFLECTS ON DAY 2, LIVE 10:00 PM ET FRIDAY, OCT 2 Paitin's Grandfather Says 'That's Why I Blame Myself' Justice Reflects on the Uncle on Trial Day 2 DAY 3, WE'RE LIVE, 9:30 AM ET MONDAY, OCT 5 LIVE: The Uncle on Trial - NC v. David Prevatte - Day 3

David Prevatte is presumed innocent. He does not have to prove anything. The State has to prove everything, beyond a reasonable doubt, and after two days it has proven that something terrible happened to a five-year-old girl in a house where five people were sleeping. The question it has not answered is the one it charged: who. And somewhere between 2018 and 2022 is the reason it decided it knew. Paitin Fields deserves to have the jury hear that reason, out loud, and tested.