The Sister's Three Interviews: Day 5 Let a Child's 2022 Tape In as Evidence. What Made It Medical?

Paitin Fields was five years old when she was rushed to the emergency room in Burgaw, North Carolina, in November 2017. Her sister Savannah was seven, and she was in the same house that night. Two days after Paitin was taken to the hospital, Savannah sat down in a small room at the Carousel Center with a forensic interviewer named Julie Ozier. Two months later she sat down with her again. And four years after that, at 11, she sat down with her a third time.

On Wednesday, Oct. 7, 2026, the fifth day of the trial of Paitin's uncle, David Prevatte, the jury heard all three of those conversations. They heard Savannah at seven say her uncle was sleeping. They heard her two months later answer an adult who told her the grown-ups had figured out somebody hurt her sister. And they heard her at 11 say she woke up and saw him come from the couch to his bedroom.

Before the jury heard a word of it, the judge had to decide what those tapes would be. Something the jurors could use only to check Savannah's testimony on the stand, or evidence they could weigh for its truth. He chose evidence. And the reason he gave pointed at the 2022 interview, the one the State's own answer to him said came with no medical exam at all, while the rule the State had argued for was a rule about statements made for medical diagnosis and treatment.

That is the question at the center of Day 5, and I am going to put it to you plainly: what was the medical purpose of the 2022 interview? The record from Wednesday does not answer it. Then the afternoon brought the State's own nurse, who found nothing medical on Savannah in 2017, the three people who were with David on the night of Nov. 12, 2017, each of whom said they never went inside, a computer that came back with nothing because nothing ever came back from it, and a detective who brightened three photographs for the State and agreed on cross that the images were altered.

First, the ground rules. David Prevatte has pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder and the other charges in this case. He was named a suspect in 2018 and charged in 2022. He is presumed innocent, and the State carries the whole burden of proving otherwise beyond a reasonable doubt. The State gave notice on Feb. 9 that it will not seek the death penalty, as the StarNews reported. Nothing I write here is a finding. A child's belief on a tape is not proof of anything, and neither is my opinion. Every question I raise is anchored to something said in that courtroom, and when it is my opinion, I will tell you.

Evidence, or only a check on her testimony?

Court opened with housekeeping. A juror's father had died suddenly, the funeral was set for Friday, and the State said one of its witnesses was traveling from Charlotte. The judge held off deciding about Friday until the State could say who was coming when. Then Julie Ozier, the Carousel Center forensic interviewer and therapist who had started her testimony at the end of Day 4, took her place on the stand again.

The State's second prosecutor, Mr. Smith, walked her back through the dates. She interviewed Savannah Fields three times: Nov. 15, 2017, Jan. 24, 2018, and Feb. 18, 2022. All three were recorded on audio and video at the Carousel Center. The day before, the court had admitted State's Exhibit 86, the disc holding all three. What nobody had settled was what the jury could do with it.

Mr. Smith told the judge he was coming back to State's 86 and "asking that they be entered into evidence for substantive purposes." The defense objected, and the jury was sent out.

The difference matters more than it sounds. When a recorded statement comes in only to corroborate or impeach, the jury may use it to decide whether the witness on the stand is consistent with herself. That is all. When it comes in as substantive evidence, the jury may take what is said on the tape as proof of what happened. Mr. Smith put it plainly when the judge asked whether there was a real difference: with substantive evidence, the State can stand in front of the jury and say this is what she said, and you can take what she said as truth.

Defense attorney Luther Johnson Britt III made his argument in two steps. First, Savannah is not a victim in this case. "Savannah Fields is not a party to this case in the sense that she is a victim," he said. If she were, he told the judge, the statements might come in under the hearsay exception for medical diagnosis and treatment. "She is only a witness in this case." He reminded the court it had watched her testify, and that much of what she said on the stand was very limited. At most, he argued, the tapes could be used to corroborate or impeach that courtroom testimony.

Mr. Smith answered that the line between a witness and a victim is not a line the rule draws. He handed up a North Carolina appellate decision on forensic interviews and told the court that "the hearsay rule doesn't distinguish between hearsay of witnesses or victims." His reading of it: forensic interviews are for medical purposes, and Savannah came to the Carousel Center for a child medical examination, which he described as a medical exam plus a forensic interview.

Britt's second step went at exactly that. The cases the State relied on all dealt with a child as a victim, he said, and the defense cited decisions of its own holding that a child's statements in an interview were not admissible under the medical exception when they were not reasonably pertinent to diagnosis or treatment. Then he said what he thought these interviews were for. "The purpose of these interviews was to try to get her to disclose what happened." And he read the court a passage about a record with no evidence that anyone had explained to the child the medical purpose of the interview.

And he walked through the three tapes as the defense sees them. The first and the second focused on what Savannah saw and heard, with no disclosure in either. Then came the gap of years, and a third interview with what he called a "semi-disclosure" about Uncle Boo-Boo, the family's name for David, being beside the sofa and then walking back to his room. That third tape, he argued, is what the State really wanted in as substantive evidence, to boost what Savannah had said on the stand.

A note on how I am handling the law here. Both sides named appellate decisions in that argument. Our standing rule is that we do not name a court decision on any surface until we have the opinion itself on file and have read it, and none of the cases argued Wednesday is in our library yet. So I am telling you what each lawyer said the cases stand for, not what the cases hold.

Under what exception?

Then the judge asked the question that, to my eye, is the most important one asked all day. "If Savannah had not testified, would you then be able to get these videos into evidence otherwise?"

"I believe, I believe so, Judge," Mr. Smith said.

"Under what exception?"

"The exception is medical." And then the prosecutor laid out the history himself. "At least the first one under medical diagnosis, she did receive a child medical exam that day." She came back two months later, he said, and did not have a child medical exam on the second visit, only a forensic interview. And on the third, when she was 11, she did not have one either.

Read that again. By the State's own account to the court, one of the three interviews came with a medical exam. The other two did not.

Then the judge ruled. He described this as primarily a circumstantial evidence case, said that part of that circumstantial evidence is the statement made by Savannah Fields, and then tied his ruling to one interview in particular: "given that that statement was made in twenty twenty two uh during an interview, a forensic examination. I do find that it is substantive." He told Britt to note his exception for the record. When the jury came back in, he told them: "states exhibit 86 will be admitted into evidence as substantive evidence."

Here is where I want you to stop and think with me, because this is the part of Day 5 that will matter long after the tapes stop playing. The hearsay rule keeps out-of-court statements away from a jury for a reason: the person who made them was not under oath and was not cross-examined when they said it. The medical diagnosis and treatment exception lets some of those statements in anyway, on the theory that people tell the truth to the people treating them, because their care depends on it. The defense's argument was that this theory needs a medical purpose, and that nobody showed one for these interviews. The State's argument was that forensic interviews at a child advocacy center are medical in purpose.

Maybe the law in North Carolina supports the State on that, and the judge clearly saw enough to rule. But the ruling, in the words the record carries, rested on the 2022 statement, and by the State's own description that interview came four years after Paitin's death, with no medical exam attached, when Savannah was 11. Later that morning, on cross, Ozier was asked directly whether Savannah underwent another medical exam in 2022. "She did not." So what was its medical purpose? I am not telling you the judge got it wrong. I am telling you that question was asked in the courtroom, in its own way, by the defense, and the answer the jury will never hear is the kind of answer that matters on appeal, if it ever comes to that.

The judge also said something worth holding on to: this is primarily a circumstantial evidence case. There is no eyewitness to what happened to Paitin. The State's case is built from pieces, and on Wednesday the court let a child's statement, made four years later, become one of those pieces in its own right.

WATCH: CASE STORY PT 22, THE RULING AND THE FIRST TWO TAPES Uncle on Trial Judge Lets Jury Weigh Sister's Interviews. On Tape: 'Nobody Didn't Hurt Her'

Seven years old: "He was sleeping"

The jury heard the tapes as sound only. By the court's broadcast order, the video stayed off the feed and the audio could be heard, so the world heard what the jury heard, a child's voice and an adult's patient questions in a small room. I am going to describe what is on them carefully, because a child is talking, and because what she says on each tape is the whole point.

The first tape is Nov. 15, 2017, two days after Paitin was taken to the hospital. Early on, the interviewer tells Savannah how the visit will go. "you're gonna get a checkup when we're done," she says. "So it's important for me to know about things that happen so that we know how to make sure you're healthy." Hold on to that line. It is the medical purpose, said out loud to the child, on the first tape. I will come back to it.

Savannah tells her who lives in the house: her Nana, her Papa and her Uncle Boo Boo, the name she uses for her uncle, David. She says she was sleeping in the living room with her sister, on the couch, and Uncle Boo was in his room. The interviewer asks what Uncle Boo Boo was doing. "He was sleeping." Did somebody do something to her sister, Paitin? "No." At one point she says she does not want to tell anybody, because it is going to make her sad.

She talks about a line. "I think it was a line," she says, describing what she saw on her sister. Later, on the second tape, the jury would hear where she says that came from. And she remembers something her uncle said at the hospital, as she tells it: "I'm going to hurt somebody if you touch the daughter." Asked again whether somebody did something to Paitin, she answers, "Mm-mm."

After the first tape, Ozier told the jury what she saw in Savannah in 2017. There had been reports of "some possible developmental delays," she said. "She was avoidant." She needed extra help with questions. All of that is the State's own witness describing the child whose words the jury may now weigh as proof.

WATCH: DAY 5 CLIP, THE 2017 TAPE Uncle on Trial: Jury Hears Paitin Fields' Sister at 7 Tell an Interviewer Her Uncle Was Sleeping

Two months later: "Nobody didn't hurt her"

The second tape is Jan. 24, 2018. Before it, Ozier told the jury later on cross, the team made a decision to tell Savannah that her sister had died, and that there were concerns someone had hurt her. You can hear that decision on the tape.

The interviewer asks where Paitin is. Savannah says she is in heaven. Why? "Because she was sick." And then the interviewer tells her something else. "The grownups figured out that somebody did something that hurt her," she says. The doctors said she was not sick, the interviewer explains, but that she went to heaven because somebody hurt her.

Savannah's answer is four words: "Nobody didn't hurt her."

The interviewer goes back to the line. "You told me last time that there was a line," she says, and asks about it. "My grandma told me," Savannah answers. The interviewer asks whether she saw it with her own eyes. And on the uncle, the second tape matches the first. What was her uncle doing? "Nothing." "He was asleep." Did somebody do something to her sister? "Nobody did."

So by the end of the morning, the jury had heard two tapes, two months apart, in which a seven-year-old said her uncle was asleep, said nobody hurt her sister, and said the line came from her grandmother. And they had heard that, between those tapes, the adults told her somebody hurt Paitin.

I want to be fair to the interviewer here, because her job is a hard one. Telling a grieving child her sister died is not wrong, and Ozier told the jury her method is to offer choices and never lead a child to a specific answer. But a defense lawyer would ask, and this one did: once a child is told the grown-ups figured out someone hurt her sister, is what she says next memory, or the shape of what she was told? The jury will have to weigh that, and the second tape is the first place it becomes a question. A clip of Ozier explaining that decision on cross is on its way to the channel.

The morning ended with a decision about Friday. The State's witness from out of the area could come Monday instead, and with juror six's family funeral and another juror's family wedding rehearsal, the judge said, "we will take Friday off."

Eleven years old: "from the couch all the way to his bedroom"

After the break, the State published the third tape, Feb. 18, 2022, recorded in what Ozier called the older kids' interview room. "Last time I saw you, I think you were like seven years old," the interviewer says. Savannah tells her she is 11.

What is she there to talk about? "My sister." At first: "I don't remember anything." Then she places herself in the living room at night, on the couch, and the account the jury had not heard on either earlier tape arrives. She woke up and saw her Uncle Boo Boo coming from the couch back to his room. "I told you this before," she says. On the two tapes the jury had just heard, she had said he was asleep.

Her fullest version: "I saw him come from the couch all the way to his bedroom." She did not hear anything. "No, I just woke up." Then the rest of the night as she tells it, and photographs of the house. Asked what she thinks happened, she names her uncle. That is a child's belief on a tape, four years later, and it is not a finding. It is also now substantive evidence the jury may weigh.

WATCH: DAY 5 CLIP, THE 2022 TAPE Uncle on Trial: Jury Hears Paitin Fields' Sister at 11 Say She Saw Her Uncle Come From the Couch

Back on the stand, Ozier walked the jury through State's 87, 88 and 89, photographs of the house she used with Savannah in that interview, and pointed to the corner of the L-shaped sofa and the line of the walk Savannah described. Then, over a defense objection that the judge overruled, she told the jury that people who harm children are "almost always known and trusted" by the child and often the family, and she explained why a child's account can change over time. "And so disclosure is typically a process," she said. "It's not unusual for there to be a trickling of information that comes out over time."

That testimony matters, and the defense will fight it all the way to closing. It is an expert explaining, in general terms, how children disclose. It is not an expert saying this child disclosed. The jury will have to keep those two things apart, and I hope they do.

WATCH: CASE STORY PT 23, THE 2022 TAPE AND THE CROSS Uncle on Trial Jury Hears Paitin Fields' Sister Place Him at the Couch in a Third Interview

What changed in four years?

Britt's cross of Ozier was quiet, and it was the most important cross of the morning. He started with how the Carousel Center works: the forensic interviewer talks with the child, then updates the medical provider on what the child shared, and the medical provider does the exam. Then he took her through which visits had an exam. November 2017? Yes. January 2018? "I don't believe she did, but I believe Mary Beth was part of the team." And 2022? "She did not."

In November 2017, Ozier agreed, Savannah could not tell her what had happened to Paitin. In the second interview, "she didn't identify anyone or anything that had happened to Paitin." Ozier agreed.

Then the gap. Was there a plan to see Savannah again in 2019? "Not to my knowledge." In 2020? "Not to my knowledge." In 2021? "Not to my knowledge." So who made the 2022 appointment? One of the investigators would have made that referral, Ozier said, and she believed it was the detective on the case at the time. Why? She could not speak to this case specifically, only in general terms. "If new or additional information has come up, um then it's sometimes the investigators will reach back out for a follow-up forensic interview." And: "presumably that's what happened in this case."

Presumably. What was the new or additional information? Nobody said. That is not a small hole. Remember the question the jury has been carrying since Day 1: David was named a suspect in 2018 and not charged until 2022. The 2022 interview came in the year of the charge, on an investigator's referral, for a reason no witness has explained to this jury.

Britt then laid out what changed. "We went from you went from a child who didn't want to talk about what happened to her sister to suddenly, and not necessarily suddenly, but in February of 2022, she just comes right out and says, I saw Uncle Boo Boo." Ozier said there was still a little avoidance, but less than before. And then Britt listed what Savannah did not say. "She didn't say I saw Uncle Boo-Boo doing ABC." "No." The record has it plainly: "She did not say that she saw him doing anything." She did not say she was woken by any noise; every time, she said she just woke up. "All she can tell you is it was dark," Britt said, and Ozier added, "and that the kitchen light was on." She did not report him having anything in his hands. She could not say how long he had been there. "Children are not good reporters of time generally," Ozier said.

Was there a plan to bring Savannah back for a fourth interview? "There was not. That was not a recommendation."

So here is where the morning leaves us. The State's strongest new piece of evidence on Day 5 is a statement an 11-year-old made four years after the fact, on a referral nobody has explained, after she had twice said her uncle was asleep and once been told the grown-ups figured out someone hurt her sister. It may be true. Children do disclose over time, as the State's expert told the jury. But it came in as substantive evidence on an argument about medical purpose, and when you set the three tapes side by side, as the transcript of them reads, the only one where anyone said a word to Savannah about a checkup or keeping her healthy is the 2017 tape, the one where she said he was sleeping.

That is the watchdog question for Day 5, and I want to be precise about it. The judge did not say which exception he relied on, and the law may support him. The State's argument was medical. The interview the judge pointed to had no medical exam, the nurse practitioner was in the building and not part of it, and the medical purpose was explained to the child on the first tape, not the third. If a statement like that is going to be the piece of a circumstantial case that tips it, the jury and the public deserve to know what made it medical.

The State's own nurse

After lunch, the judge put something on the record before the jury came back. Two jurors had told the bailiff that a man in a pink shirt had been staring at them, not just that day but for two days, and had been parking near their cars. "they felt very uncomfortable," the judge said. He had noticed the man himself, "very interested um in seeing the jury as they came in." The man was not a party or a witness in the case, and the judge ordered him kept out of the courthouse and off its grounds while the trial is in session. Jurors in a case like this one carry enough. That was the right call, made quickly, and it was made on the record, which is where it belongs.

Then the State called Mary Beth Barna, a pediatric nurse practitioner at the Carousel Center. She has spent her whole career caring for children, 14 years as a nurse practitioner, with a second specialty in child abuse pediatrics, and she told the jury she has seen more than 2,000 children at the Carousel Center. The court accepted her as an expert. She explained what the Carousel Center is, a child advocacy center, and what the child medical exam is for: "To make sure children are healthy and safe."

She also explained how the team works, and this is worth knowing after the morning's argument. The team at the Carousel Center is always a family advocate, a forensic interviewer and a medical provider. The forensic interviewer talks with the child. The medical provider examines the child. Barna said she does not sit in on the interview, the same way she would not watch a neurologist do an exam if she called for a consult. The interviewer briefs her.

Barna saw Savannah on Nov. 15, 2017, after Julie Ozier's first interview. There was no non-offending caregiver with her that day, Barna said, because Savannah was in foster care. Asked why she was there, Savannah said she had no concerns. She could not say what grade she was in. She said she lived with her Papa, her Nana, Uncle Boo Boo and Sissy, "but her sissy was not there." When the talk turned, Savannah said, "I don't want to talk about it, it makes me sad." And then, "Papa is my favorite."

Then came the answer the defense needed. Did the exam turn up any medical finding that Savannah herself had been abused? "No." On cross, Britt asked whether she made no findings of injury. "That is correct." Barna also told the jury she recommended trauma-focused therapy and a follow-up at UNC, and that she never got the UNC records of the care Savannah was supposedly receiving there. "I never got UNC records where she was supposedly being followed."

And she answered the question I raised about the 2022 interview from the medical side of the building. Barna was there in 2018. For the third session, four years later, she said: "So I was in the building, but I was not part of it." The State's point on that was that she was available if Savannah needed another medical exam. Mine is simpler. The person who does the medical part of a Carousel Center visit was in the building for the 2022 interview and did not examine Savannah. That is the record on what was medical about that day.

Seven years old, and years behind

The State then called Amanda Fortier, who was Savannah's occupational therapist through the Pender County Schools in 2016 and 2017. Savannah was in a self-contained classroom at Burgaw Elementary, and Fortier saw her once a week. "I saw her a lot," she said. Savannah had significant delays in fine motor skills and weakness in her hands. Buttons were not a skill she had mastered. She was distractible, and Fortier worked with her one task at a time.

The State asked Fortier the question it called her for. Was she working with Savannah when this happened to her sister in November 2017? "I was." Did she notice any differences in Savannah afterward? "Um not really." Savannah was, in her words, "She was happy and she was goofy." She fatigued easily. Did she ever bring up her sister? "No."

The cross went somewhere else. Britt read from Fortier's own notes, which said Savannah was "closer to acting like a four-year-old than she was her own age." Fortier agreed, and agreed that at seven Savannah was functioning at a much lower level than her age. She added a fair limit of her own: "Specifically fine motor-wise, because I would not have evaluated cognition."

Now put the two halves of the day side by side, because the jury heard them on the same day. In the morning, the State asked jurors to treat a child's recorded words as evidence of what happened in that house. In the afternoon, the State's own witnesses told them that the child had needed extra help with questions, was years behind her age on her therapist's notes, and had no medical findings of her own. None of that means Savannah is wrong. It means the jury has to decide how much weight a child's account can carry, and they will be deciding it with a tape they are allowed to treat as proof.

The people who were with him that night

Before the next two witnesses, the judge made a broadcast ruling after a bench conference: "the audio will be allowed to be broadcast, but the video of the witnesses will not be allowed to be broadcast." So the world heard these three witnesses and did not see two of them. I will tell you what they said.

Jamie Sykes, now 27, a mobile mechanic, met David in kindergarten and said they were best friends for years. He told the jury he cut ties with David and the family after Paitin's death. On the night of Nov. 12, 2017, he said, he pulled into the yard of the family home and the two of them hung out in his Jeep, outside, for 30 minutes to an hour, before he went home and went to bed. He could not recall the time, only that it was dark. He said someone else may have been with them, but he did not remember. He saw a car, but not who was in it. "I didn't see nobody," he said. Did he go inside that night? "No, ma'am." Did he hurt Paitin? "No, ma'am." The next morning, he said, David called from the hospital and needed him there immediately, and Sykes drove to the hospital in New Hanover and took him home. The defense had no questions.

Melissa Helms (then Melissa Brown), now 31, has known David since he was a child; she is not blood related, but the families are close. She said she picked David up at his house while there was still some daylight left, and they drove around. "We didn't go anywhere, didn't stop anywhere," she said. She took a phone call between about 9 and 9:30, she said, and dropped him back off around 10 o'clock. He got out and walked up, she said, and she left. Did she cause any injuries to Paitin Fields that night? "No."

Then the cross, and the sentence from a State witness that the jury will not forget. Helms said she told the sheriff's office she did not believe David was involved. Britt asked her why. The State objected; the judge let her answer. "Um I I feel like I personally know David," she said. "I just don't see him making that act, committing those acts." And then: "I know hearing everything that's happened that's going on you know it it leads to conflictions but I still really feel like he didn't do it." On redirect, the State made its point back: she did not see David the rest of the night, and she was not in the house. "No."

Her opinion of David is not evidence of what happened in that house, and the jury will be told so in its own way. But it matters who called her. The State put her on the stand.

Michael Hall, now 28, was 19 that night. He went to school with David and rode the same bus. His grandparents lived at the end of the same road. He told the jury he drove past, saw David and Jamie "out in the yard," and stopped to talk, from his Grand Cherokee, for maybe 15 to 20 minutes. When? "I'd say between 8 and 9, it was dark out." Did he go inside? "No, I've never stepped in that house." Did he hurt Paitin? "No, sir." He said he gave investigators a cheek swab. The defense had no questions.

Here is what I want you to notice, and it is the kind of thing a jury notices in the deliberation room. As they told it, these three accounts do not fit together cleanly. Helms has David with her from near dark until about 10. Hall puts David in the yard with Sykes between 8 and 9. Sykes cannot put a time on his visit at all. It may be nothing more than memories nine years old. People get times wrong. But the State built its afternoon around these three people for a reason: each was close to David on the night of Nov. 12, each was swabbed, and each said, under oath, that they never went in and never hurt Paitin. The State's case is that it was David. The question these three leave hanging is what the State's lab will say about the swabs, and on that, the jury is still waiting.

WATCH: CASE STORY PT 24, THE NURSE, THE THERAPIST AND THE NIGHT WITNESSES Uncle on Trial Jury Hears From Those With Him That Night. Each Says They Never Went In

The computer that came back with nothing

The last block of the day opened with the State telling the judge it had two witnesses left, retired detective Steve Clinard and Det. Eric Kelley of the New Hanover County Sheriff's Office, and then: "our next set of witnesses are lab analysts from Raleigh." Keep that line in mind. The re-tested DNA the State promised the jury in its opening statement has still not been shown to them, five days in.

Clinard was a special victims detective at the Pender County Sheriff's Office for 10 years, and he told the jury that a case like this one would probably have come to him. It did not, because he and his wife were leaving on vacation Nov. 14. So the call went to Sgt. John Leatherwood, a general investigator at the time with special victims experience. Before he left, Clinard drove evidence collected at the hospital in Wilmington back to Pender County and handed it to Lt. Daniel Wells, still sealed. He walked through the family home with Wells, searched the kitchen, then the yard, the side yard and the woods behind the house. He flagged nothing, he said, and saw no leashes or dog collars.

When he came back, Leatherwood had him take cheek swabs. From Lisa and Dale Hunt, if they consented. From Larry Huggins, a neighbor who Clinard said had been acting suspicious around neighborhood kids, "primarily giving them candy." From Jordan Swenson, who lived a few houses down. And, at Leatherwood's direction, from Melissa Helms and Michael Hall, because they were around the house in the hours before Paitin was taken to the hospital. "it would be logical to talk with them and to obtain some samples just in case," he said. Nothing came of Huggins or Swenson, he said. Leatherwood, as Clinard understood it, was exploring anyone whose name came up. "He was leading me to believe that that's what he was doing."

On cross, Britt took him to a search warrant that covered Melissa Helms' computer, because David had used it in the days before. What were investigators looking for? Internet searches. Did they get any such information? "We did not."

That answer sounds like it clears something up. Then the State's redirect showed what it actually meant. The sheriff's office had no one at the time who could pull data from laptops or phones, so the computer went to an outside agency, the State Bureau of Investigation or the FBI, Clinard was not sure which. "they informed me that there was a problem extracting the data, that the data ended up being corrupted, and that there was no data for them to return." And: "Um that agency ended up purchasing a new computer for Melissa Brown because they ruined her old one."

So "we did not" does not mean the computer was searched and was clean. It means nothing ever came back from it. Earlier in the day, Helms had told the jury about the same computer, "there was nothing like that," and that is true in the narrow sense. Nothing turned up because the data was lost. Nobody told this jury about a second attempt. In a case the judge himself called primarily circumstantial, a piece of potential evidence that could have cut either way was destroyed in the hands of the agency examining it. That should bother everyone, whatever they think of the uncle on trial.

Enhanced, or altered?

The last witness of the day was Det. Eric Kelley, a digital forensic examiner with the New Hanover County Sheriff's Office, trained mostly through an FBI cyber task force. He told the jury a retired captain, Det. Crowninshield, asked him to take a couple of photographs and see whether he could enhance them for better clarity. They were photographs of marks on Paitin's neck, one of them the autopsy photograph the pathologist, Dr. Karen Kelly, worked from on Day 4. How much did he know about the case when he got them? "Nothing at all."

He used a common open source program, he said, and changed brightness, contrast and saturation. He did not know which camera had taken the originals, so the settings were a judgment call. "it's not an exact science," he said. He produced three enhanced photographs, and the State offered them as State's 93.

Britt objected and the jury went out. "The objection is, these are not the original photographs," he said. "They have been altered from the original." The State answered that Kelley gave no opinion and that his adjustments are "what anyone can do on their phone." Britt answered that whatever word you use, the enhancement changes the image, and he argued its prejudicial weight was greater than its value as evidence.

The judge split it. "I do not believe that the change from the originals changes it significantly enough that it will mislead the jury," he said, and he admitted State's 93, but only together with the originals: "I do think that the jury needs to have all of the originals in order to be able to make the comparison." The State then put in the originals and State's 95, Kelley's record of every setting he changed, from starting value to ending value, and how far he zoomed in.

That is a careful ruling, and I think the comparison condition is the right instinct. But look at what the jury now holds. On direct, Kelley said each pixel is still the original pixel, adjusted to make the image clearer. "So you're not Photoshopping anything on there?" the prosecutor asked. "No, absolutely not." On cross, Britt asked whether the image was altered. "Yes, the image was altered, it has to be altered," Kelley said, because an image is just a collection of pixels, and changing even one value alters it. And then the question that matters most: so when we look at the originals, you do not see as much as you may see in the enhanced? "That is correct."

Both of those answers are true at the same time, and that is the problem the jury has to solve. The enhanced photos show the jury more than the originals do, prepared by a detective who knew nothing about the case, at the request of an investigator who did, using settings he called a judgment call. Whether what they show is clearer evidence or a clearer argument is now a question for twelve people, and the State's pathologist already told them on Day 4 that the shape she relies on is not in her own 2017 injury findings. The images themselves are not shown on our channel, and they will not be.

WATCH: CASE STORY PT 25, THE COMPUTER AND THE ENHANCED PHOTOS Detective Tells Uncle on Trial Jury the Enhanced Photos Were Altered but Not Photoshopped

Where Day 5 leaves the case

Five days in, here is what the jury has. A child who was in the house that night, whose recorded words they may now weigh as evidence: asleep at seven, asleep two months later, and at 11, walking from the couch to his bedroom. The State's own nurse, who found nothing medical on that child. The State's own therapist, whose notes put her years behind her age. Three people who were with David that evening, each swabbed, each saying they never went in, one saying from the State's own witness stand that she still does not believe he did it. A computer nobody could read because the agency examining it ruined it. And three enhanced photographs that show more than the originals, which the jury will now compare side by side.

And here is what the jury still does not have. The re-tested DNA the State told jurors about in its opening. The State says its next witnesses are lab analysts from Raleigh, so that may be where Day 6 begins. If the swabs from Helms, Hall, Huggins and Swenson, and the evidence from the home, point anywhere, the jury should hear it soon. If they point nowhere, the jury should hear that too.

They also still do not have an answer to the question that has followed this case since Day 1: what changed between 2018, when David was named a suspect, and 2022, when he was charged? On Wednesday the jury learned that the 2022 interview came on an investigator's referral, for "new or additional information" no witness named. That is a thread, not an answer. I will be watching for whether anyone ever pulls it.

I want to end where I started, on the ruling, because it is the part of Day 5 that changes what everything else means. A judge has wide room to decide what a jury hears, and this judge has been careful in this trial, including on the photographs. But "careful" is not the same as "beyond question," and our job is not to rubber-stamp a courtroom. The State asked for the tapes as substantive evidence on a medical theory. The interview the judge pointed to came with no exam, no medical provider taking part, and, as the transcript of the tape reads, no word to the child about a checkup. If that statement ends up carrying weight in the deliberation room, the reason it was allowed to should be clear to everyone watching. Right now, on this record, it is not.

David Prevatte is presumed innocent. The jury has heard the State's case through Wednesday and none of the defense's. Court resumes Thursday, Oct. 8, at 9:30 a.m. Eastern, and there is no court on Friday.

WATCH LIVE: DAY 6, COURT RESUMES 9:30 AM ET THURSDAY, OCT. 8 Watch Day 6 of the uncle's trial live with Justice

The whole day, your way

If you want every minute of Wednesday, the full live broadcast and the No Breaks Edition carry it all, and Top Moments boils it down. The full testimonies of Det. Eric Kelley, retired detective Steve Clinard, Julie Ozier and Mary Beth Barna are on their way to the channel, along with clips of the fight over State's 93, the night witnesses, and Clinard on who else was swabbed in 2017. They will all be on the Prevatte coverage page as they go up.

WATCH: DAY 5 FULL LIVE BROADCAST LIVE: The Uncle on Trial - NC v. David Prevatte - Day 5 WATCH: DAY 5 NO BREAKS EDITION The Uncle on Trial Day 5, No Breaks Edition: Savannah's Interviews Played, the Enhanced Photos Fight WATCH: DAY 5 TOP MOMENTS, PREMIERES 8:30 AM ET THURSDAY, OCT. 8 The Uncle on Trial: David Prevatte Day 5 Top Moments / The 2022 Interview and 'He Didn't Do It'

From Day 4

These went up after our Day 4 article, and they belong with it: the pathologist's full testimony, the crime scene lieutenant and the detective who recorded David on his phone, my reflection on the red earbuds, and four clips.

WATCH: CASE STORY PT 21, JUSTICE'S DAY 4 REFLECTION Uncle on Trial Jury Learns Paitin Fields' Doctor Judged Earbuds From Pictures Years Later WATCH: DAY 4 FULL TESTIMONY, DR. KAREN KELLY Uncle on Trial: Paitin Fields' Autopsy Doctor From Her 2017 Exam to the Red Earbuds, Full Testimony WATCH: DAY 4 FULL TESTIMONY, LT. DANIEL WELLS The Uncle on Trial: The CSI Who Bagged the Evidence From Paitin Fields' Home, Full Testimony WATCH: DAY 4 FULL TESTIMONY, DET. ROY BRANDENBURG The Uncle on Trial: Detective Who Recorded David Prevatte on His Phone, Full Testimony WATCH: DAY 4 CLIP, KNOWING MORE BEFORE THE SEARCH Uncle on Trial: CSI Agrees Knowing More Before Searching Paitin Fields' Home Would Have Mattered WATCH: DAY 4 CLIP, THE SHOWER QUESTION Uncle on Trial: Crime Scene Lieutenant Admits He Never Asked David Prevatte if He Showered WATCH: DAY 4 CLIP, THE ITEM IN THE PHOTO Uncle on Trial: Detective Says the Item in a Photo From Paitin Fields' Home Looked Like a Bag WATCH: DAY 4 CLIP, THE PATHOLOGIST ON SIMILAR CASES, LIVE 10:00 AM ET THURSDAY, OCT. 8 Uncle on Trial: Pathologist Doesn't Recall Similar Cases Showing What Was Under Paitin Fields' Scalp