The State's Own Expert Couldn't Rule Out That Cyrus Was Turning

Cyrus Carmack-Belton was fourteen years old. Five foot eight, a hundred and fourteen pounds, an eighth grader. The state says he was running away from Rick Chow and Rick Chow's son when a single bullet entered his lower back and stopped near his heart. Today the state put the doctor who examined his body in front of the jury, and for the first time in this trial, the science did the talking.

Dr. Amy Durso is a forensic pathologist. She has performed more than four thousand autopsies. She is the state's witness, and on direct examination she gave the state almost everything it came for.

One entrance wound. The right side of the lower back, a couple of inches off the midline, a little over forty-six inches up from the heel. No exit. The bullet traveled the wrong direction for anyone facing the person who fired it. It went back to front, slightly upward, slightly across the body. It passed through a rib, through the right lung, and into the right ventricle of the heart. She told the jury in plain terms what that means. It is not a wound a person survives.

Then came the part the jury will remember. Using a stand-in and a training gun, she walked through what the path of the bullet tells you about how Cyrus was positioned when it struck him. The angle fits a boy hunched forward, moving away from the person who fired. It does not fit a boy who has turned to point something at the shooter. The defense asked her directly whether the path was consistent with Cyrus turning to aim. She said no.

Cause of death, a gunshot wound to the torso. Manner of death, homicide. And here is where people watching at home need to slow down, because that one word does more damage than it should. Homicide in a pathologist's report is not a jury's verdict. It does not mean murder. It means one person died at the hands of another. A killing in self-defense is still a homicide on that form. So when Dr. Durso said homicide, she was not telling the jury that Rick Chow is guilty of anything. She was telling them that Cyrus did not die by accident and did not die by his own hand. Whether the law calls it murder or calls it something it excuses belongs to the twelve people in the box, not to the doctor.

If the direct examination was the state's hour, the cross was the defense's. Shaun Kent handled it for Rick Chow, and he did not come in swinging. He was careful. Polite, even. But he worked two things hard, and both of them matter.

The first was the photographs. There is a published standard for forensic autopsies that calls for a measuring scale in evidence photos so that anyone can verify the measurements later. Kent pressed her on photos that did not have one. Her answer was that she does not take the photographs. The sheriff's crime scene people do. The exchange got pointed enough that the judge stepped in and warned the defense, and the lawyers went to the bench. When it was over, the state put on the record that the scale photographs had been turned over to the defense back in January, and again in March. The defense made clear that receiving the photos was never the complaint. The complaint was the standard itself, and whether the work that built this case was done the way the field says it should be done. That is not a small thing. When the state asks a jury to take a man's freedom for the rest of his life, the defense gets to test whether every link in the chain was handled right. That is the job.

The second thing Kent worked was the one the defense needed most. He walked her toward the edge of what a wound path can actually tell you. Can she fix the exact position of Cyrus's body in the instant the shot was fired? No. Can she rule out a slight turn to the right if the shooter was directly behind him? She could not. She was honest about it. She was not in that parking lot. The path is the path, but a body is not a statue, and she told the jury they would have to put her findings together with everything else they hear to decide what happened in that moment.

Read that again, because that is the whole case in one answer. This trial is not really about whether Rick Chow fired the shot. He did. It is about whether a man who chooses to chase a fleeing fourteen-year-old can turn around and call it self-defense. The state's story is a boy running for his life, shot in the back, no threat to anyone. The defense's story is a father who believed his son was in danger, and a teenager who may have been turning in the last second before the trigger. The forensic evidence is where those two stories collide. And the state's own expert, the one with four thousand autopsies behind her, handed the defense the single thing it had to have. She could not say which way he was facing.

This is exactly what the burden of proof is built for. The state does not have to be mostly right. It has to be right beyond a reasonable doubt. When the witness the state chose to explain the science cannot rule out the defense's version of the final second, that is not a technicality. That is the gap the law puts there on purpose. My father spent his life teaching people that the system only protects you if you make it. He got prosecuted twice for teaching it. Days like today are why he bothered. A fourteen-year-old is dead, and that is a loss no verdict repairs. But the way we decide what the law calls it is supposed to be slow, careful, and fair, and it is supposed to make the state prove every inch.

So who won the day? Both sides will say they did, and both will be partly right. The state proved the shot entered Cyrus's back, and proved the path fits a boy running away. The defense proved the state's expert cannot close the door on a turn. The jury holds both of those now. That is not a contradiction. That is a trial.

▶ WATCH THE FULL TESTIMONY Chow Defense Shows Jury Cyrus Could Have Been Turning In Vicious Cross | Pt 14

The state is expected to rest in the morning. Then the defense opens, and the jury will finally hear from the son who says he saw a gun. I will be watching every minute of it. You can follow the full Rick Chow trial coverage, every witness and every ruling, at justiceisaprocess.com/coverage-chow.