The State Spent Day 2 Narrowing This Case to a Single Question. The Defense Spent It on the Gun.

A father and son chased a 14-year-old down Spring Tree Drive over water the boy put back on the shelf, and the father shot him in the back. That is the case. Day 2 was the day the state went to work proving it could not have happened any other way.

By the time the lead investigator stepped down, the state had done most of the heavy lifting of a murder trial. Three strangers who had never met Cyrus Carmack-Belton or Rick Chow told the jury the boy's hands were empty when he ran. A neutral fire chief confirmed that the only person at the scene who ever said the boy had a gun was Rick Chow's own son. A firearms examiner matched the bullet pulled from Cyrus's body to Rick Chow's pistol and not to the gun in the boy's pocket. And the lead investigator who built the entire case told the jury, in plain terms, that his department had every tool it needed to handle this without anyone chasing a child down a dark road.

The defense did what good defense does. It could not knock down the empty hands, so it went after the people describing them. It could not change the autopsy, so it used the autopsy to remind the jury the boy died with nothing in his pockets. And in the afternoon, in the best stretch it has had in this entire trial, the defense took the state's own lead investigator and walked him, one answer at a time, toward the only thing it has left. The gun.

Here is Day 2 of SC v. Rick Chow, witness by witness, and what it means for the trial that just started.

The Strangers Who Saw Empty Hands

The state opened the day the way it wants to be remembered. With people who had no reason to be there.

Jasmine Broadwater was pulling out of her apartment complex with her aunt when the chase ran in front of her. She did not know anyone in this case. She had no stake in how it ends. What she told the jury is the kind of thing that stays with people. She watched Rick Chow stand over a wounded 14-year-old with the gun still pointed down at him. On cross, the defense did what it had to do and went at her vantage point and her angle and the distance. The empty hands did not move.

Devonte Bryant was driving when he had to brake for the chase. He saw what Broadwater saw. A boy running, nothing in his hands. The defense found its opening here. Shaun Kent walked Bryant through an earlier account in which he had described the shooting in a way that everyone, the state included, now agrees could not physically have happened. Bryant grew defensive about whether his story had stayed the same. The substance of what he saw, the chase, the empty hands, the running, held up. His polish as a witness did not. That is a real deposit for the defense, and an honest read says so out loud.

WATCH ON YOUTUBE Eyewitness Describes Rick Chow Standing Over Cyrus With the Gun Still Pointed → WATCH ON YOUTUBE Driver Who Braked for the Chase Tells the Jury What He Saw →

The Gun Claim Has One Source

If one thing happened on Day 2 that the defense is going to feel for the rest of this trial, it happened through a witness the defense itself was questioning.

Gregory Walker is a battalion chief with Columbia Fire. A neutral first responder. He got to the scene early and asked the people standing around what had happened. Not one of them told him the boy had a gun. Then, on cross, the defense had Walker confirm where the gun claim actually came from. Andy Chow, Rick's son, told Walker that he had told his father the boy was armed.

Sit with that for a second. The entire self-defense theory in this trial, the reason all of us are here, traces back to a single human being. The shooter's own child. Every neutral witness who has taken that stand says the boy's hands were empty. The one person who says otherwise is the one person on earth with the most reason to say it.

The state also put on Investigator Brian Metz, who handles digital forensics for the sheriff's department. He showed the jury what Rick Chow's store actually was. Thirty-nine cameras. A stack of storage servers worth thousands of dollars apiece. Facial recognition that dropped a boundary box onto Cyrus's face as he stood inside. Metz told the jury he had never seen a store wired like this one. The defense objected, over and over, to how much of this the jury was allowed to hear. But the picture was already in the room. This was not a frightened man caught off guard in the dark. This was a man with eyes on everything.

WATCH ON YOUTUBE Fire Chief Confirms Only Andy Chow Ever Said the Boy Had a Gun →

The Evidence Chain

Crime scene investigator Michael Dooley moved the physical case into evidence. The bullet recovered from Cyrus's body. The shoe. The wound. The x-ray. A scrape photographed on the boy's right shin, the kind of mark you get when you trip and fall while you are running for your life, which is exactly what two eyewitnesses had already described.

The defense did not fight the chain of custody. It did something quieter and smarter. It used Dooley to remind the jury what Cyrus had on him when he died. No wallet. No ID. No money. Not a dollar. Not the water he was chased and killed over. A 14-year-old with empty pockets, accused of a theft the store's own cameras show never happened.

WATCH ON YOUTUBE Crime Scene Investigator: Cyrus Had Empty Pockets at the Autopsy →

Two Guns, One Bullet

The afternoon is where the state started closing doors for good.

Amanda Metz is a firearms and tool mark examiner with the sheriff's department. Two guns came into that courtroom with her. The .45 caliber Glock that belonged to Rick Chow. And the Taurus 9mm that was found on Cyrus. Metz matched the fired casing from the scene to one of them. She matched the bullet recovered at the autopsy to the same one. Not the boy's Taurus. Rick Chow's .45.

Then the defense turned to the light mounted on the boy's gun. A laser sight and a flashlight. The defense wanted the jury to look at that and see a threat. Metz would not go there. A laser sight does not turn a person into a marksman, she told them. And she admitted she had never examined whether that light was even attached to the boy's gun at all. Two firearms in that room. Only one of them fired the shot that ended a child's life. The defense spent its time on the one that did not.

WATCH ON YOUTUBE Firearms Examiner Links the Fatal Round to Rick Chow's Gun, Not the Teen's →

The Lead Investigator

Then the state called the man who ran the whole thing. Todd Jordan was the lead investigator on this case for the Richland County Sheriff's Department. He has since retired. He walked the jury back through the night, including the moment he sat in the back room of the store with Rick Chow and reviewed the surveillance footage with him.

Jordan told the jury what that footage showed. The boy at the cooler. The water going back on the shelf. The boy taking nothing. And then Jordan said the thing the state needed the jury to hear from the person who knew this case better than anyone alive. Inside that store, Cyrus never brandished a gun. He never pointed a laser at anyone. And in the whole of Jordan's investigation, not one person ever said that he did.

Then the prosecutor asked the question that hung over the entire afternoon. Did the sheriff's department have what it needed to handle this without a chase? A shoe. Two phones. Thirty-nine cameras of high definition video. A store owner who could be identified and found at his own counter. Jordan's answer was yes. They could have handled it. And no, there is no policy anywhere that tells a store owner to run a teenager out the door and down the street.

WATCH ON YOUTUBE See What the Jury Saw Inside Rick Chow's Store Before the Chase →

The Cross That Gave the Defense Its Best Stretch

And then Jack Swerling stood up, and the defense had its best hour of the trial.

Swerling did not introduce new evidence. He did something harder. He took the state's own lead investigator and walked him toward the one thing the defense has. The gun. The same Taurus that was found on Cyrus had been in the boy's hand on social media video a day earlier. Same hoodie. Same light. The defense put that still in front of the jury as its own exhibit. Then it played the video behind it, and the investigator agreed the gun was in the boy's hand, the light was on, and it appeared the gun could have been pointed at the camera. The light on that gun, the defense made sure the jury heard, matched the light on the gun at the scene.

Swerling walked Jordan back to the moment Rick Chow learned the boy had died. Was there anything in your entire investigation, he asked, that showed Mr. Chow faked his reaction? There was not.

He pressed on the witness statements. On who actually claimed the boy pointed a gun, and when they said it, and how memories get reshaped in the chaos of the hours after a shooting. He made the point that chasing a person is not, by itself, a crime. By the end, the case agent had agreed to a lot.

Then the state stood back up. And it did what it has done all trial when the defense gets too comfortable. It snapped the frame back to the chase. The boy walked out of that store calm and polite. He took nothing. The Chows came after him. He got scared and he ran. And he was shot in the back from more than the length of a football field. None of it happens, the state reminded the jury, if the Chows had stayed behind the counter.

WATCH ON YOUTUBE Defense Corners Rick Chow's Lead Investigator in a Brutal Cross →

Where Day 2 Leaves the Trial

Here is the honest read on Day 2.

The state did almost everything it needed to do. The foundation it laid on Day 1 is walls now. Three strangers say the hands were empty. A neutral fire chief traced the gun claim to one person, the shooter's son. A firearms examiner matched the fatal bullet to Rick Chow's gun and not the boy's. And the man who ran the investigation told the jury his department could have ended this without anyone chasing a child. The state is close to resting, and it is resting on a case that is built.

The defense knows exactly what it has left, and Day 2 showed us what that is. It is the gun. It is a 14-year-old who really did have a loaded pistol on him, who really had handled that same gun on video the day before, and a father who says he fired because his son told him the boy was armed. The best work the defense has done in this entire trial was Swerling taking the state's own investigator and walking him toward that gun. They are going to build their whole case on it. Watch for it.

The state is not quite done. Its medical examiner still has to take the stand, the witness who gives the jury the clinical account of how a 14-year-old ended up dead on Spring Tree Drive. That testimony carries its own weight, and it deserves its own focus, so I am giving it a separate breakdown from this one.

After the medical examiner, the state is expected to rest. That is when this trial turns a corner. The state has spent its case telling the jury the Chows hunted a child down. Then the defense puts on its own case, and the question shifts from what the Chows did to what they believed in the second they did it. The first defense witness is where this whole story flips.

None of this is a verdict. Rick Chow is presumed innocent today exactly as much as he was the day he was arrested. The presumption of innocence does not get weaker because a case is ugly, or because a defendant is unpopular, or because the man has sat in a detention center for nearly three years waiting for this week. It applies hardest in the cases the public most wants to see end one way. The State of South Carolina has to prove this beyond a reasonable doubt. The defense does not have to prove anything at all.

My father spent his life on that idea, and the system convicted him twice for insisting on it. I carry that lens into every day of this trial. The burden is on the state. It always was. The state's case is almost fully told now. The medical examiner closes it out, and then we finally hear the other side.