Takaaki Iwabu - tiwabu@newsobserver.com
Michael Galloway with the City-County Bureau of Identification shows evidence to jurors during Jason Young's retrial Monday.
RALEIGH -- A crime-scene investigator was on the witness stand all Monday in the retrial of Jason Young, providing a familiar account of videotaping, photographing and combing the crime scene for evidence of what happened to Michelle Young.
Michael Galloway, an investigations supervisor for the City-County Bureau of Identification, an evidence-collection arm for Wake County law enforcement agencies, described a bloody scene as the second week of testimony opened in the second trial of Young.
Young, 37, is accused of bludgeoning his wife to death in the master bedroom of their home, then leaving her and their toddler daughter in the Wake County home they shared.
Young, a medical software salesman, testified during his first trial that he did not kill his wife and did he have anything to do with her death.
That trial, which was based on a largely circumstantial case, ended with the jury deadlocked 8-4 for acquittal.
During the first week of the retrial, prosecutors varied their strategy slightly from the trial last summer.
They stressed with many witnesses Jason Young's reluctance to offer law enforcement, family or friends an account of his whereabouts around the time of his wife's death until he took the stand in June.
But as prosecutors offer the forensic side of their case in the retrial, the testimony of Galloway has been relatively consistent with what he offered in the summer.
When he arrived at the Youngs' home in the Enchanted Oaks neighborhood just south of Raleigh, Michelle Young, 29 and pregnant, was face down on the floor of the master bedroom. She was between the bed, Jason Young's closet and a dresser. Her feet were under the bed, and her head just inside the closet doorway.
Blood everywhere
Investigators found blood from the floor to the ceiling. There was blood behind the dresser, spatter on the wall and blood on both sides of the closet door, as if it were moved during the attack.
There were bloody footprints, believed to be those of a small, sock-footed child, tracked from the bedroom to a bathroom down the hall.
Michelle Young was beaten so badly, Galloway said, investigators found teeth knocked from her mouth under her body, under a pillow and on the floor around her.
"I found her face to be horrific," Galloway said.
Prosecutors contend Young left a Virginia hotel at about midnight, made a three-hour drive home, killed his wife, then returned to Virginia for business.
Defense attorneys describe the prosecution's theory as one that does not make sense. They argue that Jason Young had only one bruise on his big toenail and no other scrapes or abrasions on him a short time afterward. They also argue that investigators found no blood in Young's white Ford Explorer.
Galloway testified Monday that investigators found bloody shoe prints on pillows on the floor and on the floor near the body.
There also were bloody footprints on the floor that investigators contend were made by Cassidy, the couple's daughter, 2 years old at the time. Meredith Fisher, an aunt of the girl and younger sister of Michelle Young, said Cassidy wriggled out from under the covers of her parents' bed, not physically harmed, while her mother was dead on the floor.
Galloway said he took note of a bottle of adult-strength liquid Tylenol on a shelf along with a medicine dropper inside Cassidy's bedroom. Prosecutors contended that Jason Young might have tried to drug his daughter to make her drowsy.
Galloway said investigators found blood on the knob on a door between the garage and kitchen.
Investigators found a tire track in the mud next to the driveway and noticed water running from a hose in the backyard.
The defense is expected to cross-examine Galloway today.
