Recap of Trial: Day Three
The trial continued last Friday for Theodore Wafer, 55, who is facing 2nd degree murder charges as a result of the fatal shooting of Renisha McBride on his front porch in Dearborn Heights last year in early November.
On the third day in court, his attorney Cheryl Carpenter raised multiple concerns regarding the delays in collecting evidence made by the Dearborn Heights Police Department, and also the issue of evidence contamination.
Allegedly police didn’t collect the screen door through which McBride was shot until 9 days after the shooting. Carpenter feels that this is an enormous oversight, as the state of the screen door is critical to the defense’s case, she claims.
Carpenter spent some time discussing the issues of contamination and lost evidence, before confronting officer Mark Parrinello, a crime scene evidence technician, about McBride’s clothing having been allegedly infested with maggots as a result of having sat next to a rotting deer carcass at the Dearborn Police Department.
According to Parrinello, the contamination occurred at the Wayne County Morgue, not at the police department. He says he picked between 6 and 8 maggots off McBride’s clothing while it was drying in a room, having been soaked with rain on the night of McBride’s death.
While these facts aren’t likely to have much effect on the outcome of the trial, Mary Mazur, a spokeswoman for the Wayne County Medical Examiner’s Office, says there is no instance in which a deer carcass would have been placed next to the body of a murder victim.
Mazur said she had been assured that there was no deer meat in the medical examiner’s office on that particular day. “The only time we have bodies of animals is when they are brought in retrieve a bullet or something related to a crime and that’s usually like a dog or something.” she said.
However, she pointed out that flies are attracted to all manner of bodily fluids and could have laid eggs on the articles of clothing, which contained traces of multiple bodily fluids, at any point after McBride’s death.
It was also possible, she said, that flies may have been present in the medical examiner’s office, as they sometimes deal with cases that involve decomposing corpses, and bodies are not placed in the freezers until after the autopsy is performed.
The Renisha McBride murder trial resumed this morning at 9 am. It is expected to take about three weeks.