Who Answers for the Log? Six Days of the Hauschultz Trial, Before the Jury Decides

A seven-year-old boy named Ethan Hauschultz died in April 2018, in a backyard in the town of Newton, Wisconsin, after two hours of carrying a log in wet snow and mud. The boy who was in charge of him that afternoon was fourteen. He is already in prison for it. The man on trial is not that boy. He is Timothy Hauschultz, Ethan's great-uncle and court-appointed guardian, and on the afternoon Ethan went down he was out running errands with his wife.

That is the whole puzzle of the Buried Beneath the Snow Trial, and six court days have not made it simpler. The State says Tim Hauschultz chose the punishment, chose the two hours, chose the logs, and chose the teenager he left in charge. The defense says he set a household rule, never told anyone to hurt a child, and is being asked to answer for violence he never imagined. Who answers for a punishment another person carried out? That is the question under every witness, every exhibit, and every one of the six counts.

This article covers all six days. It is the first one on the site for this trial. The Case Story Parts, the No Breaks editions and the Top Moments for each day are on the YouTube channel and linked below, but a trial this size needs a place where the whole arc sits together. From Day 7 on, the daily article comes at the close of each court day. Today is the catch-up.

One more thing before I start, because it matters for how you read everything below. Timothy Hauschultz is presumed innocent. He pleaded not guilty. Nothing in this article is a finding. As I write this, the night of October 20 into October 21, the jury has the case, has not reached a verdict, and is due back in the courtroom Wednesday morning. Where I give an opinion I will say it is mine and I will tell you the facts it rests on. Where I describe what a witness said, I am working from the court record as it aired.

The Six Counts, and What the State Has to Prove

People are charged with acts, not with a death. Tim Hauschultz is charged with six counts, and the jury will be asked about each one separately.

Count one is child neglect with death as the consequence. The State has to prove he failed, by action or by not acting, to provide the necessary care for Ethan, that the failure seriously endangered the child's health, and that it was a substantial factor in producing his death. There is a lesser version of count one, plain neglect without the death, and on Day 5 the defense agreed the jury may be offered it. Count two is intentionally contributing to the delinquency of a child, with death as the consequence: the State's theory is that he enlisted a fourteen-year-old to carry out the punishment. Count three is physical abuse of a child, intentionally causing bodily harm, charged as party to a crime, which means the State does not have to prove he did it with his own hands. Counts four, five and six are the same family of charges for a second boy in the home, who was out in the yard that day too.

One instruction runs under almost all of it. Wisconsin law recognizes reasonable discipline of a child. Judge Carey Reed read the jury the rule on Day 6, and the defense pointed out that it applies to counts two through six. Where it applies, the State carries an extra burden. In the judge's words, the State must prove "by evidence which satisfies you beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant did not act reasonably in the discipline of a child." So the jury is not only asked whether a boy was hurt. It is asked whether the punishment this household used was a crime or an unusual choice that the law leaves to a guardian.

Day 1, Tuesday, October 13: Two Openings, One Question

Before the jury saw anything, there was a fight over paper. The State had given its own medical expert roughly 450 pages of juvenile and child-protection records. The defense wanted the judge to read them privately and decide whether any of it helped the defense. Judge Reed denied that request on Day 1 but left a door open for when the expert took the stand. Hold onto that fight. It comes back on Day 4.

WATCH: HOT CLIP, DAY 1 Buried Beneath the Snow Trial Judge Denies Hauschultz Defense Motion on Records State Gave Expert

Then came the openings, and the two speeches put the whole trial in front of the jury in about thirty minutes. The State: "He chose the punishment, he chose the amount of time, and he chose the size of those logs, as well as the supervisor in charge." And then, on the drive to the hospital: "And they didn't call 911." The prosecutor, District Attorney Jacalyn LaBre, told the jury that Damian, the fourteen-year-old, had described the boy lying in the snow as "kind of a snow coffin."

The defense did not deny the wood carrying. Attorney Donna Kuchler told the jury Tim "used what might be an unusual form of discipline," then said the State "has twisted what happened here to make Tim look like some sort of monster." Her case was that Damian was told to leave Ethan alone, did not, and buried the boy in snow while the guardian was away. The defense asked for a verdict of not guilty.

WATCH: CASE STORY PART 1 Buried Beneath the Snow Trial Openings Clash Over Who Answers for Ethan Hauschultz's Death / Pt 1

The State's first witness was William Manis, a former Manitowoc fire chief working as an ER paramedic, who carried Ethan from the lobby to the trauma room. Then came the doctor who fought for Ethan's life. Dr. Rebecca Reim, the emergency physician at Holy Family, told the jury her team worked for about five hours to raise his body temperature, which she put at roughly 74 degrees Fahrenheit when he arrived. She told the jury that the adults who brought him in said they were not sure what had happened because they "weren't home," and that she could not leave the room to go ask anyone. Her medical point, made on redirect, became the State's whole argument about time: "that first hour is golden."

CLIP Buried Beneath the Snow Trial Ethan's ER Doctor Says Call 911 Because the First Hour Is Golden

The next witness carried the defendant's own words into the room. A special agent who was a sheriff's deputy in 2018 interviewed Tim at the hospital and at the house, and told the jury what he remembered. When children misbehave, the agent said, Tim told him "there's a consequence, and the consequence is carrying wood." He described three phone calls from home that afternoon, the first contact at 2:24 and the call that brought Tim home at 3:13. On what Tim said he told Damian when the boy called to say Ethan had stopped, the agent said Tim told Damian "to let Ethan just sit there or something to that effect." And on why nobody called 911, the agent testified that Tim "thought about it, but he did not know, and that he had hoped that Ethan would get better."

WATCH: CASE STORY PART 2 Buried Beneath the Snow Trial Agent Testifies Hauschultz Said He Thought About Calling 911 / Pt 2

Two details about that testimony deserve to be said out loud, because the jury has to weigh them. Every word of it is the agent's recollection of a conversation, hedged more than once with "something to that effect." And the defense got its best hour of the whole trial out of this same witness on cross. The agent agreed that "after the third call, he went right home." Asked whether an ambulance would have reached the house faster, he answered, "There's no way to know." He agreed Tim told him he "flew down Washington Street" and ran two red lights on the way to the hospital. The defense also fought, with a recording played in the room, over whether Tim says "not responding" on the tape or does not. It was left unresolved. That small argument is still alive on Day 6.

WATCH: CASE STORY PART 3 Buried Beneath the Snow Trial Investigators Testify About the Log in Hauschultz's Backyard / Pt 3

The afternoon belonged to the yard. A drone operator, a State Patrol reconstruction trooper and a retired sheriff's detective, James Michel, walked the jury through the scene. Michel told them Tim called the wood carrying "his discipline" on the back deck, said it was for children who "talk back," and, as Michel remembered it, called his own punishment "rather harsh." That is real evidence for the State on the thing the whole case turns on, whether the guardian owned the punishment.

Then the defense took its turn. On cross Michel agreed that when he asked Tim about the block of wood and about what happened to Ethan, Tim answered that he did not know "because he wasn't there." On redirect the State got one line back: Tim "also identified this as a form of discipline." Before the jury returned for that stretch, Kuchler put on the record that she believed two jurors had been nodding off. The judge asked that attention be watched as it happened and questioned no one.

WATCH: CASE STORY PART 4 Buried Beneath the Snow Trial Detective Confirms Hauschultz Said Three Times He Wasn't There / Pt 4

The day ended with retired detective Michael Herrmann, who photographed and collected the evidence in the yard, and what he described is the closest the trial gets to the snow itself: a reddish and white substance beside the first log, a red and gray shovel against the deck with no other shovel in the backyard, and a hollow in the snow that "appeared to be the shape of the body," with areas consistent with shovel marks. None of that is disputed by the defense. It proves what was done to Ethan in that yard. It does not by itself say what the man who was not there ordered or knew.

WATCH: CASE STORY PART 5 Buried Beneath the Snow Trial Retired Detective Describes Shovel Marks in Hauschultz's Yard / Pt 5 WATCH THE WHOLE DAY Buried Beneath the Snow Trial Day 1, No Breaks Edition: Openings and the First Seven Witnesses TOP MOMENTS Buried Beneath the Snow Trial: Day 1 Top Moments / Openings, ER Doctor, What He Told Investigators

Day 2, Wednesday, October 14: The Logs, and the Teenager in the Yard

Day 2 started with a table full of wood. Herrmann was back, and the logs came out of their evidence bags in front of the jury. A sheriff's office scale gave the two that matter a number: 44.4 pounds for the log by the snow pile where Ethan was found, and 35.6 pounds for the one the State says the other boy carried. Ethan weighed about 62 pounds. I flagged one question that day and I will repeat it here: the scale tells you what those logs weighed in an evidence room. Whether they were weighed wet out of the snow or dried is the kind of thing a juror asks in the back room.

WATCH: CASE STORY PART 6 Buried Beneath the Snow Trial Detective Puts the Hauschultz Logs at 44.4 and 35.6 Pounds / Pt 6

The defense came back at Herrmann on cross with a plain question, and I think it is one of the better questions of the trial. Which log did any child say he or she carried? As far as Herrmann knew, no child was ever shown a log, and he could not identify any log Tim had told anyone to use. The State will tell the jury the children described their logs in detail in 2018 and that the physical evidence fits. The defense will tell them nobody ever asked a child to point.

WATCH: CASE STORY PART 7 Buried Beneath the Snow Trial Detective Can't Identify Any Log Hauschultz Told Anyone to Use / Pt 7

Then the State called Damian Hauschultz, Tim's stepson, who was fourteen that day and is serving a prison sentence for what happened to Ethan. He took the stand as a State witness, and he is the most important witness in the trial for both sides.

On the State's side, he said the wood carrying was Tim's order. Asked who decided how long, he answered, "It was also Tim who decided that." Of that Friday afternoon, he said Tim "told me to make sure we went out there and we did." The adults left, and Damian was in charge of a yard that had melted into slush and mud under about eighteen inches of earlier snow. The boys slipped and fell, and the logs got heavy. He told the jury he hit and kicked them to keep them going, and described the number of blows with the words "about a hundred." He told the jury Ethan lay down and would not move, and that he covered the boy with snow, about twenty minutes' worth, and sat on the porch. "Frankly," he said of the moment he went back, "when I remembered he was in there."

He also told the jury he called Tim twice. The first time was before the snow, and Tim said they would be home "in a bit." The second time he said something was not right and they should hurry home, and, in his words, "I think I was freaking out a bit when I was on the phone, so don't know how much I actually got across to them." When the adults arrived, they asked what he had done. There was a bath and dry clothes, and then the hospital. Nobody called 911.

WATCH: CASE STORY PART 8 Buried Beneath the Snow Trial Stepson Damian Testifies He Called Hauschultz Twice About Ethan / Pt 8

Watch how the State handled him, because it matters later. The prosecutor kept testing his memory against what he told a detective in 2018. On the question of why the boys were being punished, he said he knew then and no longer remembers: "I would have known then. I just don't remember now." The State, in other words, impeached its own witness on the details while relying on him for the thing that points at Tim.

Then the defense cross, and the part Damian gave to the defense is just as large. He agreed Tim never told him to hurt the children. He agreed the boys were allowed breaks between laps. Asked whether law enforcement ever had him look at what they held in evidence, he said, "I don't believe so." The defense also walked him through his own anger at the three cousins who had come to live in the house, anger the defense later argued no one else in the home knew about, and the cross laid the foundation for the closing argument: Damian's violence, not Tim's rule, is what Ethan died of.

WATCH: CASE STORY PART 9 Buried Beneath the Snow Trial Stepson Says Hauschultz Only Told Him to Go Out With the Boys / Pt 9

The day closed on science and a kitchen. A crime lab analyst, Clarinda Ellison, testified that swabs from the ground were tied to Ethan with a profile she put at at least one in seven trillion, and that the logs themselves gave no profile. The envelope holding the log's swabs was found damaged in 2023, according to the testimony, and each side will tell you what to make of that. The after-hours crisis worker for child protective services, who sat at the Hauschultz kitchen table the night Ethan died, described a whiteboard that read "two additional hours," with Ethan's name on three days of the week. On cross it came out that the days were Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. April 20, 2018 was a Friday. Nobody on the stand said what those hours were for.

WATCH: CASE STORY PART 10 Buried Beneath the Snow Trial DNA Analyst Confirms No Blood Detected on the Hauschultz Logs / Pt 10 WATCH: CASE STORY PART 11 Buried Beneath the Snow Trial CPS Worker Saw Two Additional Hours on Hauschultz's Whiteboard / Pt 11 WATCH THE WHOLE DAY Buried Beneath the Snow Trial Day 2, No Breaks Edition: Stepson Damian Hauschultz Takes the Stand TOP MOMENTS Buried Beneath the Snow Trial: Day 2 Top Moments / The Logs, the Stepson Testimony, Three Calls

Day 3, Thursday, October 15: The Doctor Who Called It Abuse

Day 3 belonged to one State witness. Dr. Lori Frasier, a child abuse pediatrician hired by the district attorney to read the record, told the jury the wood carrying itself was abuse. Ethan carried a log she put at "two-thirds of his body weight." Punishments like this, she said, are "designed to sort of break the will and humiliate the child rather than to guide and discipline the child." She added that discipline is meant to guide a child into the right behavior, "not to break their will and to humiliate them and force them into activities that are beyond their capacity to do."

She also gave the State its medical clock. A very cold child can be brought back, she said, so the minutes before anyone gets help count. "Time is of the essence." On the stand she said fifteen to thirty minutes can make a difference, as the State reminded the jury in its closing, and that is the root of its argument on count one.

WATCH: CASE STORY PART 12 Buried Beneath the Snow Trial Pediatrician Calls Ethan's Wood Carrying Abusive Discipline / Pt 12

Then Kuchler tested what the opinion stood on. Dr. Frasier agreed she charges $500 an hour, had been paid twice, never met or examined the children, and wrote her report about three and a half years after the fact. She had reviewed the Manitowoc County Sheriff's Office summary report. Asked about Damian's recorded interview, she answered, "Right, but I didn't watch it." She agreed her opinion is only as good as the information she was given. She knew Tim was not home and that Damian caused Ethan's injuries. The defense will tell the jury a conclusion built that way is a hammer looking for a nail.

WATCH: CASE STORY PART 13 Buried Beneath the Snow Trial Doctor Admits She Never Saw Damian Hauschultz's Interviews / Pt 13

The most interesting stretch of Day 3 happened with the jury out. The two sides fought over what the jury could hear from another child's recorded interview, and the argument turned on porridge, ear pulling, and whether the porridge was a punishment from Tim's wife and not from Tim. Judge Reed called it contextual evidence, said "that door's open," and let the video be played.

WATCH THE WHOLE DAY Buried Beneath the Snow Trial Day 3, No Breaks Edition: A Child Abuse Pediatrician Takes the Stand TOP MOMENTS Buried Beneath the Snow Trial: Day 3 Top Moments / The Abuse Opinion, $500 an Hour, the Video Ruling

Day 4, Friday, October 16: Two Doctors and a Ruling the Jury Never Saw

Day 4 opened with the jury out and the judge reading. The defense wanted the child-protection records one of the State's doctors may have relied on. Everyone in the room had a reason to want them except the judge, who had not seen them. He called the request late and heard it anyway. He then read the records himself and ruled. A couple of sentences in a social worker's report came in for cross-examination, and the rest of the request was denied. That was the records fight from Day 1 coming home. The reflection I did on it is titled "Why Hauschultz's Jury Saw Only a Few Lines of the CPS File," and I stand by the question in that title.

WATCH: CASE STORY PART 14 Buried Beneath the Snow Trial Judge Will Read the CPS Records and Lets Dr. Petska Testify / Pt 14 REFLECTION Buried Beneath the Snow Trial: Why Hauschultz's Jury Saw Only a Few Lines of the CPS File / Pt 18

Dr. Wieslawa Tlomak, Milwaukee County's chief medical examiner, did Ethan's autopsy and gave the State its cause of death. She found a rib fracture with no sign of healing, a boy of 62 pounds, no natural disease, nothing in the toxicology, and she concluded hypothermia due to environmental cold exposure. A child loses heat faster than an adult, she told the jury, and wet clothes make it two to three times faster. Two hours with a heavy log drained what he had left.

Then the defense used her for its own case. Asked about the injuries on Ethan's body, she agreed there were about a hundred, which matches the number Damian gave in court. She agreed she could not say who inflicted them. And she agreed an autopsy cannot show what Tim told Damian to do. The jury also asked for her testimony in writing and was told no, they must rely on their memory, though they could send her written questions. I keep thinking about that, because her testimony was technical and the jury was told to remember it.

WATCH: CASE STORY PART 15 Buried Beneath the Snow Trial Medical Examiner Testifies Ethan Died of Hypothermia / Pt 15 WATCH: CASE STORY PART 16 Buried Beneath the Snow Trial Medical Examiner Can't Tell Who Inflicted Ethan's Injuries / Pt 16

The second doctor was Dr. Hillary Petska, a child abuse pediatrician who never examined Ethan and built her opinions from records. Her diagnoses: severe fatal child physical abuse, supervisory neglect, medical neglect, and "forced exercise." She put the log at 44.4 pounds, almost three quarters of Ethan's weight, carried for two hours with no dropping it, and a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old left in charge. On the 911 question she said what the State needed said: with earlier care, Ethan could have lived. In my view that was the State's strongest line of the whole week.

The defense then went straight at what she was given. She was brought in more than a year later, retained by the State, and her first bill was for fourteen hours of work. Her answers on what she had and had not been shown, which were the defense's claims in its questions and not findings, showed how much of her opinion came from summaries. The State got one question back, and her one-word answer ended the cross.

WATCH: CASE STORY PART 17 Buried Beneath the Snow Trial Doctor Diagnoses Supervisory and Medical Neglect for Ethan / Pt 17 WATCH THE WHOLE DAY Buried Beneath the Snow Trial Day 4, No Breaks Edition: Two Doctors on How Ethan Died TOP MOMENTS Buried Beneath the Snow Trial: Day 4 Top Moments / Records Ruling, Hypothermia, Could He Have Lived

Day 5, Monday, October 19: The State Rests, and a Judge Troubled by How It Got There

The State's last two witnesses were a Manitowoc police lieutenant and a retired sheriff's detective named Bessler, and what stands out about both is how little of what they said comes straight from the source. The lieutenant, who saw Ethan carried through the ER, testified from a report he wrote that day, with no recording, about what Tim said in the hospital family room: that children need discipline and are made to do physical things such as carrying logs. He said Tim told him bad children carry logs. On cross the lieutenant agreed nothing was recorded and that he was working from his report.

Detective Bessler interviewed Damian the night Ethan died. She told the jury what the boy told her about the punishment as Damian described it: two hours, keep moving, never drop the wood, and standing still meant more time outside. She said a child who started at noon and did not finish could be out there until 9 p.m. She told the jury about the second phone call, around 3:10 p.m., and what Damian said Tim's reply was: "okay, let him be." The State played part of her 2018 interview with Damian, so the jury heard it in his own voice.

CLIP Buried Beneath the Snow Trial First Officer Says Hauschultz Told Him Bad Children Carry Logs WATCH: CASE STORY PART 19 Buried Beneath the Snow Trial Detective Says Damian Was Told to Say Ethan Fell From a Tree / Pt 19

The cross was the defense's second-best moment of the trial. Kuchler walked Bessler back through Damian's interviews: the first call home had Ethan "playing possum," Tim came home angry at Damian, and on the tape Damian says he thought he made Ethan too cold. Bessler agreed Damian was minimizing in that first interview. Then the tree. Damian had at one point said Ethan fell from a tree, and he later said he was told on the way to the hospital what to say. The defense put it to Bessler that the tree story first came up in an interview in December, eight months later, with Damian's lawyer in the room. Her answer: "Very possible." The defense wanted the jury to ask what else changed in eight months.

CLIP Buried Beneath the Snow Trial Defense Says the Tree Story Came Up Only Eight Months Later

With the jury out, the State rested, and the defense moved to dismiss all six counts. Judge Reed did not hold back about the way the State had tried its case. "As I said earlier in the trial, I was troubled by the way this case was being presented," he said, and he called the order in which the State put in its evidence "just bizarre." Then he denied the motion. The standard is the evidence in the light most favorable to the State, and on that standard he found it supports each count. That is not a finding of guilt. It is a low bar by design, and the jury never heard any of it.

WATCH: CASE STORY PART 20 Buried Beneath the Snow Trial Judge Keeps All Six Counts as Hauschultz Declines to Testify / Pt 20

Then the defendant spoke. Timothy Hauschultz told the judge he would not testify. That is his constitutional right and the jury is told not to hold it against him, and I will not either. The defense rested without calling a witness. With the evidence closed, the lawyers and the judge worked through the instructions, and a small drama played out over the lesser charge on count one. The defense first told the judge it did not want the jury to have a lesser option. After time to talk it over, it agreed. The defense also argued that two of the counts punish the same act twice. The State disagreed, and the judge's first view sided with the State, with room to revisit it in the morning.

WATCH: CASE STORY PART 21 Buried Beneath the Snow Trial Defense Agrees Hauschultz's Jury Can Weigh a Lesser Charge / Pt 21 WATCH THE WHOLE DAY Buried Beneath the Snow Trial Day 5, No Breaks Edition: Hauschultz Won't Testify TOP MOMENTS Buried Beneath the Snow Trial: Day 5 Top Moments / Let Him Be, the Tree Story, Every Count Stands

Day 6, Tuesday, October 20: The Instructions, Three Closings, and a Jury Sent Out

Judge Reed read the law before anyone argued. The jury was told that the State must prove every element beyond a reasonable doubt, that the defendant pleaded not guilty, and that on counts where reasonable discipline applies, the State must also prove he "did not act reasonably in the discipline of a child." They were told about party to a crime: on three counts he can be convicted without doing it himself. They were also told to search for the truth, a phrase I would like to see sit comfortably beside the presumption of innocence. The State's burden is proof of six charges, and a search for what happened in a backyard is a wider question than that.

WATCH: CASE STORY PART 22 Buried Beneath the Snow Trial Judge Tells Hauschultz Jurors When Discipline Becomes a Crime / Pt 22

The State closed first, and District Attorney LaBre began with what is not in dispute. There is no dispute, she said, that Damian "was brutal and hit and struck" the boys that day. There is no dispute that Damian put Ethan in the snow. There is no dispute that Ethan died of hypothermia. "What you need to decide is what the defendant's role in these events are. Not Damian's role, but this defendant's."

Her answer was a list of choices. Tim chose the punishment. He chose two hours. He chose the logs: Damian's was a branch of ten to twelve pounds, she said, and the boys got logs of 44 and 35 pounds, "very different than what Damien was using." He chose the teenager in charge. "He enlisted someone who was 14 in carrying out this punishment." She pointed to his own words on the recording, that he was told Ethan was unresponsive, and gave the jury a timeline: a missed call at 1:47, the first connected call at 2:24, the second at 3:13, and a hospital video that puts Ethan at the door at about 3:52. In between, she said, came a bath and new clothes and no 911 call, and the doctors all said an ambulance can start care right away. And she told the jury what she wants on count one: the jury has a choice between neglect that caused death and the lesser neglect, and the first one turns on whether the delay in care was a substantial factor in Ethan's death.

She asked for guilty on all counts. "Ethan deserved that. He deserved to be protected and cared for, not the abuse and neglect by this defendant."

WATCH: CASE STORY PART 23 Buried Beneath the Snow Trial State's Closing Says Hauschultz Chose Ethan's Punishment / Pt 23 CLIP Buried Beneath the Snow Trial Prosecutor Weighs a Light Branch Against Ethan's 44-Pound Log

The defense closing answered each point. Kuchler started with the law: "you cannot substitute suspicion for proof," and you cannot hold Tim criminally responsible for Damian's conduct "just because he's the adult in the family." She reminded the jury that two months before Ethan died, in February 2018, Tim told a social worker his disciplinary practices, carrying wood among them. "He was openly discussing them," she said. Her theory was the one she opened with. "It was Damien's violence towards Ethan that caused his death." And "there's nothing in this record whatsoever that Tim instructed Damien to impose physical discipline on Ethan." She used the medical examiner for it. The injuries matched what Damian described, about a hundred of them. The rib fracture was deep in Ethan's back and unlikely to come from a falling log.

She went after the State's doctors with the argument she built on Day 3 and Day 4: two paid experts hired to say there was abuse, who relied on a summary and did not watch the interviews. She argued that no child ever picked out one of the pieces of wood shown in court as the one he or she was required to carry. The log Ethan lay over was the one Damian laid him over after digging him out of the snow, she said, and Damian agreed it could have marked the border of the track. The red substance beside it was there because of what Damian did, not because that was Ethan's log. And on the timeline, she accepted that Tim got home within about ten minutes of the 3:13 call, took Ethan off the log, stripped the wet clothes, warmed him, and was at the hospital by 3:52. "Don't turn a guardian's desperate panicked rescue attempt into some kind of criminal calculation." Then the sentence I would remember if I were on that jury: "I submit that medical neglect would be actually leaving the child at home hoping he's going to get better, rather than rushing him to the hospital."

WATCH: CASE STORY PART 24 Buried Beneath the Snow Trial Hauschultz Defense Puts Ethan's Death on Damian Not the Wood / Pt 24 CLIP Buried Beneath the Snow Trial Defense Climbs the Levels of Proof and Asks for Not Guilty on All Six

The State had the last word. LaBre told the jury the defense closing was "smoke and mirrors," and went through it. The call that Ethan was unresponsive came at 3:13, she said, not at the moment the defense counted from, and there was probably a gap of at least twenty minutes between that call and the drive to the hospital. She said the defense kept repeating that Damian was never told to discipline the boys, when he was told to make sure they carried wood for two hours. To the vagueness of it, "carry wood could be carrying firewood, could be carrying a pencil," she answered that the specifics were in the children's own interviews: Damian described the logs to Bessler, and Ethan's sister told Bessler which log was his. Of who chose, she said Damian admitted the boys sometimes picked their own, but "the ultimate person who decided what logs were carried were Tim." And she told the jury paramedics had reached that area before in three to four minutes. The defense had said in its closing that there was no testimony about when an ambulance would have arrived. Closing arguments are not evidence, and that disagreement is one for the jurors' memory of the record.

Then the last instructions, and the verdict forms, one reading of guilty and one reading of not guilty for each count. The clerk drew two alternates from a hopper, thanked them, and released them. Twelve jurors went out to deliberate. Hours later they sent a question about the date in count six, which turned out to be a typographical error, and went back to the room. They did not reach a verdict. The judge sent them home to return Wednesday morning.

WATCH: CASE STORY PART 25 Buried Beneath the Snow Trial State's Rebuttal Says Hauschultz Picked Ethan's 44-Pound Log / Pt 25 WATCH THE WHOLE DAY Buried Beneath the Snow Trial Day 6, No Breaks Edition: Closings, Then Deliberations TOP MOMENTS Buried Beneath the Snow Trial: Day 6 Top Moments / Instructions, Closings, No Verdict

Where Each Side Is Strong, Count by Count

Here is how I would read it if I were sitting in that box. The jury's opinion is the only one that decides this, and I say mine as mine, built on the facts above.

The State's best ground is the punishment itself, and what it asks of Tim directly. Damian said Tim decided how long. Michel testified Tim called it "his discipline" and, in Michel's recollection, "rather harsh." The agent's account of Tim's own interview has him saying the boys carry wood when they misbehave. A 44.4-pound log for a 62-pound boy, for two hours, in slush, is a number a juror will not forget. Two doctors said the wood alone was abuse. If the jury accepts that carrying wood this way was abuse, and that it was not reasonable discipline, then the question of what Damian added on top of it matters less for counts three, five and six, and the party-to-a-crime instruction does the rest. For me this is where the defense has the hardest road. The reasonable discipline instruction is the one thing the defense needs and the State has the heaviest facts against.

Counts one and two are where I think the case is most open, and the reason is the same on both sides. Count one turns on the thirty-nine minutes between the 3:13 call and the hospital video. The State has Dr. Petska saying Ethan could have lived with earlier care, Dr. Frasier saying fifteen to thirty minutes can matter, and a defendant who, by the agent's account, thought about calling 911 and did not. The defense has a medical examiner who could not say what an autopsy shows about instructions, an agent who agreed there is "no way to know" if an ambulance would have been faster, and, as the defense told the jury, no ambulance crew member to say how fast one would have come. A juror who thinks Tim should have called 911 still has to decide whether that was a substantial factor in Ethan's death, and the lesser count one is sitting right there. Count two, enlisting a teenager in a punishment that resulted in death, asks the jury to connect an order Tim gave to a death he did not see. My honest read is that the gap between "he set up the punishment" and "he is responsible for how Damian carried it out" is the State's biggest exposure, and the one the Day 6 closings argued hardest from both sides. I cannot prove which way twelve people will go on it, and neither can anyone else.

There are three things that bother me about how the State built this. First, the judge himself said on the record that he was troubled by how it was presented and called the order of its evidence "just bizarre." Second, the log. The State's own lab found no profile on the logs. The red substance by the first log is Ethan's, but the defense is right that it sits where Damian laid him after digging him out. The weight of the State's identification of that particular log rests on what children said in 2018 and Damian's testimony, and no child was ever shown a log. Third, the records. Two months before Ethan died, the defense told the jury, Tim sat down with a social worker and described the carrying of wood openly. The system had that conversation, and the jury was handed a few sentences of the file the judge read alone. None of that is a defense to what was done to Ethan. It is a fair question about what the system knew and when.

The defense has its own problems. Its core theory needs the jury to rely on Damian's sworn testimony where it helps and set aside his earlier accounts where it does not. It needs the jury to hear "I flew down Washington Street" as a rescue and not as a man who had spent more than twenty minutes at home. And it needs the jury to look at a man who told one officer that children need discipline and made them carry logs, and who told another that he was not there, and decide that the second sentence is the whole story.

What to Watch for When the Jury Comes Back

Whatever the verdict is, it will be six answers to six questions. I will be watching for the count-by-count pattern. Guilty on the lesser neglect and not guilty on the death-resulting counts would tell you the jury accepted the punishment was wrong and did not accept it caused the death. Guilty on the abuse counts and not guilty on neglect would tell you the jury read this as a case about the wood and not the delay. A split like that is not a compromise. It is a jury doing what the instruction tells it to do, which is look at each charge alone.

The jury has asked one question so far, and it was about a date. After that, nothing. Deliberations resume Wednesday morning, October 21.

Every Part of the Case Story, from the openings through the closings, is on the Wisconsin v. Hauschultz coverage page. If you are new to this one, start with Part 1. A seven-year-old boy is dead, a teenager is in prison, and a guardian who was not home is waiting on twelve strangers to decide whether the law says he owes an answer for it.