The Second Look: Day 3 Put the 2017 Investigation on the Stand, and Showed What It Missed

Paitin Fields was five years old. On the morning of Nov. 13, 2017, a Pender County detective named John Leatherwood was sent to the hospital where she had been taken, then redirected to the children's hospital in Wilmington, where nurses told him what they had found. Before the day was out he had recorded her grandmother and her grandfather, sent a crime scene team to the family home, and started the investigation that, almost nine years later, has her uncle, David Prevatte, sitting at a defense table in Burgaw.

On Day 3, the State of North Carolina put that investigation on the stand. Not the lab results. Not the doctors. The investigation itself: the detective who started it, the detective who sat in on the family's interviews, the tapes those detectives made, and the lieutenant who walked through the house with a camera and a property sheet. Every witness the jury heard on Monday was a piece of the first look the Pender County Sheriff's Office took at that house in November 2017.

And by the end of the day the jury had heard, in the State's own case, a lieutenant tell them he looked at the most talked-about item in this trial a second time, after the lab reports came back, and only then saw something on it. That is the day in one sentence. The State is asking this jury to trust what its investigators saw. Day 3 kept showing what they saw later, what they did not see at all, and what nobody watching from home can see.

So that is how I am going to walk you through it. The second look. What the 2017 investigation looked like when the State held it up to the jury, and what it missed or has not yet shown.

First, the ground rules, because they matter more on a day like this than on any other. David Prevatte has pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder and the other charges in this case. He is presumed innocent, and the State carries the whole burden of proving otherwise. The State gave notice on Feb. 9 that it will not seek the death penalty, as the StarNews reported. He was named a suspect in 2018 and was not charged until 2022. Nothing on Monday told this jury what changed between those two dates. I will tell you what I think as I go, and I will tell you when it is my opinion.

The State's first question to its own detective

John Leatherwood is retired now. He gave his full name to the court reporter, told the jury he spent 18 years with the Pender County Sheriff's Office, and said that by the end he was a major crimes investigator, the man they sent on child deaths and the worst cases the county had. In 2017 he was the lead detective on this one.

Then the State asked him a question I have rarely heard a prosecutor ask its own lead investigator in front of a jury. Was he "recently diagnosed in 2025 with mild cognitive decline?"

"Yes."

Did he take medicine for that? "Yes."

Think about why a prosecutor does that. It is a trial lawyer's move: you take the sting out of a bad fact by being the one to say it first, so the jury hears it from you and not from the other side. It was smart. It was also an admission, made by the State in its own case, that the man who built the first version of this investigation is not a witness whose memory the jury can lean on. Everything he said for the next hour landed under that cloud, and the State knew it would when it called him.

The direct was short and mostly about the hospital. He was headed to the Pender hospital when the call came, he was diverted to Wilmington, hospital police were waiting, and two nurses took him in to see Paitin and told him about her injuries. Based on that, he began an investigation. He interviewed Lisa Hunt and Dale Hunt at the hospital, separately, and he recorded both.

WATCH: CASE STORY PT 12, THE LEAD DETECTIVE AND THE HOSPITAL TAPES, LIVE 12:00 AM ET TUESDAY, OCT 6 Uncle on Trial Jury Hears Family's Hospital Tapes, Then His Nails Were 'Cut and Cleaned'

Tapes the jury may use only one way

Those two recordings are State's Exhibit 30, and the fight over them was the most important ruling of the morning. I want to explain it carefully, because it controls how every word on those tapes can be used, and most people watching at home missed it.

The State moved the tapes in "for substantive purposes." That phrase means something specific. Substantive evidence is proof of what happened. If a recording comes in as substantive evidence, the jury can treat what is said on it as evidence of the facts themselves. The defense objected. With the jury out of the room, Mr. Britt argued the tapes could come in to corroborate or to impeach, "but not as substantive."

Corroborate means back up. Impeach means undercut. Lisa and Dale Hunt both testified on Day 2. Under the limit the defense asked for, the jury can use their 2017 interviews to decide whether what they said on the stand last week was consistent with what they said in the first hours, or not. The jury cannot use the tapes as independent proof of what happened inside that house.

The judge agreed with the defense. "I will allow exhibit thirty to be admitted into evidence as either corroborative or impeachment." The jury was brought back and told the limit before a second of tape was played. A short stretch of Dale Hunt's interview was muted by agreement, so the jury never heard it.

That was a real win for the defense, and it is worth asking why the State reached for more. A prosecutor who offers a recording for substantive purposes wants the jury free to treat the words on it as proof. Which words? When you listen to these tapes, the accusing words are not the Hunts'. They are the detective's. Keep that in mind for what comes next.

His mother, at the hospital

Lisa Hunt's interview played first. It is a grandmother at a hospital who does not yet understand what the people around her already suspect. She describes a sick little girl: a fever and a cough, children's ibuprofen, a half dose of something else. At bedtime, "she had a little fever, but she was fine."

She names the people in the house: her husband, her son David, who had just turned 19, and the two girls, Savannah, who was seven, and Paitin. The girls were on the couch because the house was being remodeled. In the morning she found Paitin sitting up on the couch, and "her eyes were rolling back in her head."

She told the detective "my husband was in the bed with me." Asked about her son, she defended him in the way you would expect a mother to: "He's been around these babies since they were born."

And then there is a passage I am not going to describe in detail, where the detective shows her a picture and tells her what he thinks it means. She is hearing for the first time what the hospital believes happened to her granddaughter. You can hear it land.

WATCH: THE HOT CLIP, HIS MOTHER'S 2017 HOSPITAL INTERVIEW Uncle on Trial: Jury Hears His Mother's 2017 Hospital Interview With the Detective on Paitin Fields

His stepfather, at the hospital

Dale Hunt's tape is a different animal. He is angry from the first minute: angry that the family cannot see Paitin, angry that people are telling him different stories. The detective explains that when a child comes in with what looks like suspicious trauma, the hospital locks the room down and nobody involved gets in. Hunt tells him what he remembers of the morning, the drive to the hospital, his son holding the girl the whole way.

Then the detective tells him where the investigation is pointed. He says he does not think anybody broke into the house. He tells Hunt what time David came home the night before, by his information. And then he says this:

"I'm not saying he did it. I'm not saying he didn't do it, but somebody did it."

That is the shape of the State's case, said out loud by the lead detective within hours of the call, before a single item of evidence had been tested. Somebody inside that house. Hunt ends his tape asking why his family is being investigated over a child who had seizures. You can hear the man who raised David Prevatte refusing to believe it of his son, and you can hear the detective, gently, not letting go of the idea.

Now go back to the ruling. On this tape, the person putting David Prevatte in the frame is the detective, not the witness. The judge's limit means the jury cannot treat the detective's suspicion as evidence. They can only use the tape to measure Dale Hunt's own account against what he said in 2017. That is a distinction a jury can lose track of over a long trial, and I hope it gets repeated to them before deliberations.

What the cross found

The defense cross of Leatherwood was not dramatic. It did not need to be. Mr. Britt went at the investigation, and he got a lot.

Leatherwood walked up to the family in the hospital waiting area after he was told they were there. Was the family visibly upset? He would say so. Was David visibly upset? "I can't remember."

He did interview David at the hospital, in a room the hospital gave him. He thought David was second, after Lisa. In the interview room, he said, David was emotional. Asked what he meant by that: "He was angry. He was all over the place. But he wasn't crying."

I want to be fair to that answer, because it was the clip that went around Monday night. A detective's read of a 19-year-old's face in a hospital, years later, from a witness who has just told the jury about his own memory diagnosis, is the thinnest kind of evidence there is. People do not grieve on a schedule. Anger is a common first reaction to a child in an intensive care unit. And the same man could not remember, two answers earlier, whether David was upset in the waiting room at all.

Then came the line I think matters more. Did he record the interview with David? "Yes, I did." How long was it? About 30 or 40 minutes, he said.

Here is why that matters. In its opening statement on Day 1, the State told this jury: "They interviewed Lisa, Dale, David, and you're going to be able to hear those interviews." Openings are promises, not evidence. Through three days, the jury has now heard Lisa's interviews and Dale's interviews, at the hospital and at the sheriff's office. It has not heard a word of David's. Leatherwood recorded one at the hospital. Detective Lobel, later in the day, said he interviewed David twice at the sheriff's office. None of that has been played. The State's case is not over, and it may still come. But the State made that promise in the first ten minutes of this trial, and on the day it played four family tapes, none of them was the man on trial.

Leatherwood agreed the tapes the jury had just heard of Lisa and Dale were the complete interviews. He went to the house after the hospital. About eight officers were there to search it. He saw items collected, but the evidence stayed with the crime scene investigators, not him. Were they packaging it? He would say so. In what? A brown paper bag, a plastic bag? "I don't know." He said he did not collect any of it himself.

He talked to Lisa and Dale Hunt "several times throughout the investigation." He did not think he interviewed David several times. He worked the case until he retired, in 2020. And when he retired, David Prevatte had not been charged. Nobody had been arrested. Asked whether the investigation stayed active after he left: "I have no idea. When I left, I left." Asked whether anyone working the case ever called him after he retired: "No."

Sit with that for a second. The lead detective, the man who recorded the family, photographed the child and sent the team to the house, retired in 2020 with nobody charged. Two years later the State charged David Prevatte. In those two years, according to his own testimony, nobody working the case picked up the phone to call him. Whatever changed, it did not come from him. That is the four-year question this trial keeps circling, and on Day 3 the State's own witness made it sharper.

One more thing from the cross, and it is a loose end I want tied up. Asked how many times Savannah was interviewed about this by a child forensic interviewer, Leatherwood said, "Once." On Day 1, the defense told this jury in its opening that she was interviewed in 2017 and again in 2018. Maybe the question was narrower than it sounded. Maybe the defense has the count wrong. But a witness who opened his testimony with a memory diagnosis just gave a number on the most important witness in this case, and that number does not match what the jury was told on Day 1. Somebody needs to settle it in front of the jury.

There was no redirect. Leatherwood was told he stays under subpoena, subject to recall.

"Cut and cleaned"

The State's next witness was Det. Sgt. Mark Lobel: about 13 years with the Pender County Sheriff's Office, and 25 before that with the New York City Police Department, where he finished as a homicide investigator. Leatherwood asked him to sit in on the Hunts' interviews at the sheriff's office on the afternoon of Nov. 13, 2017. He never went to the house. He told the jury that sitting in on interviews was the whole of his part in the investigation.

But the State did not call him for the interviews alone. It called him for this. He had contact with David Prevatte on Nov. 13, and he noticed his hands. "Long fingernails," he said, with "items or some kind of dirt or objects underneath his nails." The next day, Nov. 14, David came to the office. Lobel shook his hand and looked at it, and his hands "had been, my opinion anyway, had been manicured. So they were cut and cleaned."

That is the first piece of evidence in this trial aimed squarely at David Prevatte's own body, and it is vivid. The State knows it.

Now take the second look at it. It is one detective's opinion, from a handshake, eight-plus years ago, in his own words "my opinion anyway." No photograph of David's hands on either day was offered through him. No scraping from under those nails was mentioned through him. And think about what else the record says about Nov. 13. On Day 2, his mother and stepfather told this jury David held Paitin on the drive to the hospital and tried to help her breathe, and that she soiled him. A 19-year-old who spent the morning doing that, and the day in a hospital, cutting and cleaning his nails before he goes back to talk to detectives the next day is one reading. Guilt is another. The State is entitled to argue the second. It has not proved it with this.

If there is lab work tied to David's hands, the jury has not heard it. If there is not, the defense will spend closing on the word "opinion."

"Either you or that man"

Lobel then identified two discs: the sheriff's office interviews of Dale Hunt, State's Exhibit 32, and Lisa Hunt, State's Exhibit 33. Both came in under the same limit as the hospital tapes, to corroborate or impeach only. After a short break the State read the agreed mute times into the record with the jury out, and the jury came back to watch.

Dale Hunt's video is the hardest thing the jury saw on Monday. It was made the afternoon of the day Paitin was taken to the hospital. She was on life support. The detectives tell him, in effect, that the hospital is certain about what happened to her, and that it happened in that house sometime during the night. Hunt's position does not move: "my son didn't do it."

Then the detective puts it to him directly. Somebody in that house did that to that child, and, in his words, "I'm gonna tell you it's either you or it's that man sitting out there."

That man was David. The detectives tell him the seven-year-old could not have done it. They work the night's timeline back toward about three in the morning. They point out that the times don't match: by their account, his wife put David home around 10 or 11, and David's own account put it earlier, around 8:30 or 9. Hunt answers in anger and in grief. "That's my baby."

WATCH: THE HOT CLIP, "EITHER YOU OR THAT MAN" Uncle on Trial: Detectives Tell His Stepfather It's 'Either You or That Man' in Paitin Fields Case

Here is what I want you to see in that tape, and it cuts both ways.

For the State, it is the frame of the whole case in the investigators' own voices: a closed house, two adult men inside it, a child ruled out, a gap in the night. That frame is the State's theory today, and on Monday the jury watched it get built in real time, in 2017.

For the defense, it is the same tape. Two detectives, on day one of the investigation, before a single item came back from a lab, are telling a grandfather it is him or his son. That is what investigators fixing on a theory early looks like. The defense has been saying since Day 1 that this case was built on no more than investigators had at the start. On Monday the State played the jury the start.

And again, nobody on this tape says David did anything. The man being pressed says the opposite. Every accusing word on it belongs to a detective, and the jury may not use a detective's suspicion as proof.

WATCH: CASE STORY PT 13, THE 2017 SHERIFF'S OFFICE TAPES, LIVE 12:30 AM ET TUESDAY, OCT 6 Uncle on Trial Jury Watches Detectives Tell His Family Nobody Snuck Into Paitin Fields' Home

A mother who cannot say

Lisa Hunt's sheriff's office interview followed. She tells the detectives she takes seizure medication at night and is usually out once she does. She walks them through the weekend: Paitin sick, a trip to town for medicine, the girl sleeping most of the afternoon. On Sunday night, she says, her son was out in the yard with a friend. She called out the door for him to bring in the house phone. She heard the friend leave. Not long after, she says, "David knocked on the door," she let him in, and he went to his room and shut the door.

The detective lays it out for her the same way they laid it out for Dale. Unless somebody comes up with a reason to think someone snuck in, the detective tells her, the only people in that house that night were Lisa, David, Dale, Savannah and Paitin.

And then the question the State wanted the jury to hear. When she found Paitin and David came out of his room, did he seem wide awake, or did he seem like he had been asleep?

"I honestly, I can't answer that."

That is the State's sharpest moment of the day, and it is a non-answer. Think about what it is being asked to carry. A grandmother who takes seizure medication at night, describing the worst morning of her life, hours later, could not say how her son looked when he came out of a bedroom. If she had said he looked wide awake, that would be something. She did not. If she had said he looked like he had been asleep, the State would have a problem. She did not say that either.

Put it next to Day 2 and you see what the State is building. Last week the jury got two different clocks for when David came home. Monday they got a detective pointing out the difference, a mother who could not say whether her son had been asleep, and a house with no one else in it. It is a tighter story than it was on Friday. It is still a story about what nobody saw.

The defense cross of Lobel was about a minute and mostly hard to hear on the feed. What came through is the part that matters: Lobel interviewed David twice, both times at the sheriff's office. There was no redirect, and Lobel was released from his subpoena.

No questions from the jury

Before lunch the judge did something small that I want to flag. He told the jury he thought a question had been directed to a bailiff last Friday, and he addressed it: "in the exercise of my discretion, you are not allowed to ask any questions, whether of the witnesses or of the bailiffs regarding the evidence." They are to receive the evidence "without questions or comments."

He said "my discretion," and that is the right word. It was his call to make, and keeping a jury from asking about evidence through a bailiff is plainly correct. But think about what that juror was doing. Somebody on this panel had a question about the evidence badly enough to ask the person standing nearest to them. We do not know what it was. After Monday, I suspect this jury has more of them, and the only people who can answer them are the lawyers, by what they choose to put in front of it.

The witness we could not hear

When court came back from lunch, the State raised one matter before the jury came in. Its next witness was Savannah Fields, Paitin's sister. She was seven in 2017. She is 16 now.

The parties had already discussed keeping her off the broadcast. The State told the judge the broadcaster had asked about airing her audio without video, and that the State would be all right either way. It also said, "it's hard to identify her by her voice." Mr. Britt had nothing to add. The judge said he had already told the broadcaster he was not going to allow her voice. "I think I'd rather stick with that. No voice, no video for her testimony. I feel a lot better about that."

The camera was tilted up and the sound was cut before she walked in. She testified for most of an hour. The jury heard every word. We heard nothing, and I am not going to report or guess at any of it.

WATCH: CASE STORY PT 14, THE SISTER OFF THE AIR AND THE HOME, LIVE 1:00 AM ET TUESDAY, OCT 6 Judge Keeps Paitin Fields' Sister Off the Air as Uncle on Trial Jury Tours the Home

Let me be careful here, because this one deserves to be looked at from both sides.

Protecting her is a legitimate thing for a court to do. She was a small child in that house. Her sister died. She is a teenager being asked to sit in a courtroom and testify in front of her family and the man accused, and whatever she says will follow her. Keeping her face off the internet is not controversial, and nobody asked for it to be aired.

The voice is a closer call, and the record shows how it was decided. The State, the party calling her, told the court it was fine with audio and that her voice would be hard to identify. The defense did not object either way. The ruling rests, on the record we have, on the judge's initial inclination and the words "I feel a lot better about that." I am not saying he was wrong. I am saying the reason given in open court was a feeling, not a finding, and when a court takes the most important testimony in a trial out of public view, the public is owed a reason it can test.

And this is the most important testimony in the trial, by the State's own account. In its opening, the State told this jury that around 3 a.m. Savannah woke and saw David Prevatte standing by the couch where her sister was, and then saw him walk back to his room. That was the State's promise about what its identity witness would say. The defense answered in its own opening that her 2017 and 2018 interviews never mention David and that she had been coached.

Whatever she said Monday, the case now turns on testimony the public cannot hear, cannot weigh, and cannot check against those openings. The jury can. We cannot. Every read you hear of this trial from here on, including mine, has to carry that asterisk. When I tell you how a day went, I am telling you how it went on the part of the record I was allowed to see.

The house, the way they found it

The State then called Lt. Daniel Wells. He has been with the Pender County Sheriff's Office since August 1997, after the North Carolina Department of Correction and the Burgaw Police Department, and a detective since 1999. In 2017 he was what he is now: the lieutenant over crime scene investigation and the property and evidence room. He stands about six foot seven, which will matter in a minute.

Leatherwood called him from Wilmington that morning and told him to go to the office and get a search warrant ready, "because we knew we were going to end up having to have one." The warrant was signed toward lunchtime. Deputies were already holding the house. Nobody from the family was there, and they did not want to break the door in, so they waited for a key. While they waited, Wells and Det. Brandon Bird walked the edge of the property and heard a dog barking inside.

Dale Hunt and David Prevatte pulled up. Asked who unlocked the door: "Mr. Hunt did." The State also showed the jury a photograph of the vehicle that pulled up in the yard with David in it, taken to record its plate.

Then the method. A walk-through first, with a detective he named as Kleiner, touching nothing, to get the layout. Then the camera, from the front door, working right to left, "picture, picture, picture," documenting everything the way they found it. And what they found, in his words, was a house "cluttered, unkempt. I would call it dirty." Pots and pans with standing water in them. The smell of dog urine over everything. Walls and doors in disrepair.

State's Exhibit 35, the disc of photographs from Nov. 13, came in with no objection and went up on the courtroom screen. The mailbox. The yard. A piece of mail found at the house, addressed to Lora Flowers, Paitin's mother. The back of the house, where the rear door sits with no steps under it; Wells, at six foot seven, put the bottom of that door six to seven feet off the ground. The front porch, with steps going down both sides. Did he see any sign of forced entry at the front door? "No, sir."

That was the purpose of the photographs, and it is a fair point for the State. A back door nobody can walk through, a front door with no damage, dogs inside that bark when someone comes in the yard. It is the physical version of what the detectives told Dale Hunt: nobody came in.

Then room by room. The kitchen. The living room with its L-shaped couch, where the girls slept that night. An alcove to the main bedroom. Two corner bedrooms off the living room, a hallway past the laundry to a bathroom and that rear door. In the northeast bedroom, a chair, a bassinet behind it, a bed, and on the floor beside the bed, a pair of pants with underwear on top. A second set of photographs on the same disc was taken by Det. Sgt. Roy Brandenburg, and Wells agreed many are duplicates of his own: "We were both taking photographs."

Now the second look at the house. The same photographs that show no forced entry also show a house so cluttered its own crime scene lead struggled to describe some of it. On one photograph he could not say from the picture whether a door was a closet or a bedroom. On one item he could not place it from memory. A cluttered scene is not a crime, and it is not a defense either, but it is the kind of scene where things get missed, and on Monday the jury found out that at least one thing was.

The bags on the table

After the afternoon break, Wells stayed on direct for the rest of the day, and the State walked him down his property sheet, item by item.

He said Leatherwood had told him what kind of case it might be, so the team looked for any sign of a struggle, anything involving a child, clothing, and fluids. But the house made that hard. "It was a mess because with all the obvious visible signs of different types of biological fluids throughout the house, uh honestly didn't really know where to start." So he picked a spot and worked from there.

That is an honest answer, and I respect it. It is also an answer the defense will read back to him on cross. The lieutenant in charge of processing the scene told the jury he did not know where to start.

Then the exhibits. State's 36 is David Prevatte's cheek swab, a known DNA standard, and State's 37 is Dale Hunt's. Both went to the State Crime Lab. Then the clothing: a child's blue denim pants from a mattress in the southeast bedroom, State's 38; and the pants and underwear from the northeast bedroom floor, seized as one item and later split so the lab could test each separately, State's 39 and 40. Then a can of whipped topping from that same bedroom, near the bassinet, and its nozzle, bagged separately, State's 41 and 42. Nearly every exhibit came in with no objection heard.

Then the floor beside the bed in the northeast bedroom. A red set of earbuds. Phone charging cords. Wells told the jury they took every cord in that photograph, and when the State asked why, he said it was because of what Leatherwood had told the team investigators believed had happened to the child.

Notice what that answer means. The search was shaped before anyone walked in the door. The lead detective told the crime scene team what he believed had happened, and they bagged items that fit it. That is how investigations work, and it is how they go wrong. When the theory comes first, the evidence that fits the theory gets collected first, and anything else waits for a second look.

The earbuds and three charging cords are State's Exhibits 43 through 46. The State asked to publish them by letting the jurors handle them, and the judge allowed it. The jurors put on gloves. The judge told them they could handle each item "individually and without comment," and starting with the back row, each piece went from hand to hand down the box. It took a long time.

That was a powerful moment in the room, and it tells you where the State is going. It also tells you where the State is not yet. As of the close of Day 3, the jury has held the objects. It has not heard a single result.

The second look

So the State asked Wells about the earbuds. When he collected them, did he notice anything of significance? Not then, beyond the reason they were taken. How about later?

"After they were sent to the lab and some reports were received, we did look at them again."

And what he saw, looking again, was that on sections of the wire, "you can tell that some of the plastic insulation has been stretched and has small ripples and stuff in it."

He did not say what caused it. No lab result has been offered. He did not say what the reports said that sent them back to look. And the State asked nothing more about it before passing the earbuds to the jury.

WATCH: CASE STORY PT 15, THE RED EARBUDS AND THE SECOND LOOK, LIVE 1:30 AM ET TUESDAY, OCT 6 CSI Tells the Uncle on Trial Jury He Saw Stretched Earbud Wires Only After Lab Reports

Go back to Day 1, because both sides told this jury to watch for exactly this. The State's opening: "I urge you to pay attention to a pair of red earbuds that they find in David's room." It told the jury its evidence was "tested when this case first happened, and they were tested later on after some advances in DNA technology," and it named the earbuds among the items to watch. The defense opening: "Pay particular attention to what the witnesses say about the red earbuds." And then the defense described a detective who kept sending things back to the labs, asking the same question over and over: "could this be it?"

On Monday, the State's own crime scene lieutenant told the jury the detail he now points to was not something he saw at the scene, or when he bagged the item. He saw it when he went back and looked again, after the lab reports came in. That is very close to the picture the defense painted in its opening. The State will say he simply looked more closely once the lab told him where to look, and that experienced investigators do that all the time. The defense will say this is what it looks like when the evidence is fitted to the theory after the fact. Both are arguments. Neither is proof yet. What decides it is what was in those reports, and the jury has not seen them.

He said he noticed nothing special on the two charging cords, then or later. "It was just one of those cords that was there and it was seized." Same for the third cord. State's 47, an item from a vacuum cleaner in the same bedroom, he thought was on the floor, but he could not place it from memory and needed the photographs to find it.

Then the last exhibit of the day, and the one that should bother everybody. The State took him back to the living room photograph, the couch area. Did he find any possible items like the cords in that room? "Not on that date."

On another date? "I think it was the 17th." On a second search warrant, four days after the first search, they found "a hot glue gun with a cord on it" "under the edge of the table there to the right of the couch." The couch where the girls were sleeping. It is State's 48. He saw nothing like it in that room on the 13th. The jurors passed it down the box in their gloves.

This is the second look in its plainest form, and there are only two ways to read it. Either the first search, the one shaped by the lead detective's theory and run by a lieutenant who did not know where to start, walked past a corded item beside the couch where Paitin slept. Or the item was not there on the 13th and was there by the 17th. Either answer is a problem somebody has to explain. Why did they go back? What told them to look under that table? Who decided what got bagged on the 13th? And if the first search missed that, what else did it miss?

I am not suggesting the glue gun is or is not anything. Wells said he made no special observations about it, then or later. The point is narrower and it matters more. The State is asking this jury to trust what its investigators collected, and on Monday its own witness told the jury that an item it thought worth bagging was not collected on the first day. That is a door the defense will walk through on cross.

The jury took off their gloves, threw them away and went home. Court recessed until 9:30 Tuesday morning, with Wells still on direct and the defense's cross still ahead.

What Tuesday owes this jury

Here is where the day left things, as I see it.

The State had the better day in the room. It built its frame: a closed house, five people in it, two adults who slept through the night, a seven-year-old the detectives ruled out, a back door no one could use and a front door with no sign of forced entry. Into that frame it put one detective's opinion about David Prevatte's fingernails, a mother who could not say whether her son had been asleep, and a table of evidence bags the jury held in its own gloved hands. As a story, it points one direction.

The defense had the better day on the record. Every accusing line on the tapes came from detectives, not witnesses, and the tapes came in only to back up or undercut. The lead detective started with a memory diagnosis, did not handle the evidence, left in 2020 with nobody charged, and was never called again. The physical evidence has no lab result attached. The earbud detail was seen after the fact. A corded item beside the couch was collected four days after the first search. And the witness the State's whole identity case was built around testified where none of us can follow.

So here is what I am watching for on Day 4, and what I think this jury is owed before the State rests:

The cross of Lt. Wells. Who decided what got bagged on the 13th, whether that glue gun was in the living room that day and, if it was, why the first search did not take it, why they went back on the 17th, and what exactly the lab reports said that sent him back to the earbuds.

David Prevatte's own interviews. The State promised in its opening that the jury would hear them. Leatherwood recorded one. Lobel conducted two. The jury has heard none.

The lab. The State told the jury its evidence was tested in 2017 and tested again after advances in DNA technology. That retesting is the most likely answer to what changed between 2018 and 2022, and three days in, not a word of it has reached the jury.

And the four years. A suspect named in 2018. A lead detective gone in 2020 with no charge and no phone call afterward. An arrest in 2022. The jury still has not been told what happened in between. It is the State's burden to tell them.

I recorded my own reflection on Day 3 as Part 16, including what I make of the lead detective's testimony. If you want the whole day without the cuts, the No Breaks edition has it, and Top Moments premieres Tuesday morning before court. There is more from Day 3 still coming. Day 4 is live at 9:30 a.m. Eastern.

WATCH: CASE STORY PT 16, JUSTICE'S DAY 3 REFLECTION, LIVE 2:00 AM ET TUESDAY, OCT 6 Lead Detective Tells Uncle on Trial Jury of His Memory Decline and No Call After He Retired WATCH: THE FULL DAY, NO BREAKS EDITION The Uncle on Trial Day 3, No Breaks Edition: The Detectives and the Family's 2017 Interviews WATCH: DAY 3 TOP MOMENTS, PREMIERES 8:30 AM ET TUESDAY, OCT 6 The Uncle on Trial: David Prevatte Day 3 Top Moments / 'When I Left, I Left' and the 2017 Tapes WATCH: THE DAY 3 LIVE BROADCAST LIVE: The Uncle on Trial - NC v. David Prevatte - Day 3 LIVE: DAY 4, 9:30 AM ET TUESDAY, OCT 6 LIVE: The Uncle on Trial - NC v. David Prevatte - Day 4