The State Made the Speed Lethal. The Defense Made It Ordinary.

Cedric Hayden Jr. was 34. DeJuan Pettis was 33. Two friends most of their lives, two autoworkers, two fathers with two kids each. Day one of James Burke's manslaughter trial belonged to the officers who were on Schoenherr Road the morning a Warren police SUV came down it at better than 100 miles an hour with no lights and no siren. Day two belonged to two things the jury is going to carry into that deliberation room. What the speed did to the two men in the white Durango. And the rulebook the state says the officer behind the wheel ignored.

The question has not changed since the first hour of this trial. Who killed them. The state says it was Burke and the speed he chose. The defense says it was the man driving the Durango, who was drunk, whose license was suspended, and who turned across the cruiser's path. Day two did not answer that question, because the witness who can answer it, the crash reconstruction expert, still has not taken the stand. What day two did was make the speed feel lethal in a way no number ever could, and then hand the defense some of the strongest material it has gotten yet.

Before the jury was even seated, the judge was already fighting to keep the outside noise away from them. She had seen the media doing interviews right outside the courthouse, the Fieger firm in particular, the same firm that filed the hundred million dollar lawsuit against the Warren Police Department over this crash. She ordered it stopped on court property, and she was blunt about why. She is not going to let her trial get tipped into a mistrial because somebody needs to be on camera. Then a stipulation went on the record that the defense had been waiting to make official. On the morning of the crash, the man driving the Durango had a suspended license.

The speed stopped being an argument and became a number on the screen

Officer Michael Rodolfo came back to finish the testimony that carried over from day one. Burke's partner of two years. The man named as the victim in the third charge. The man who chose Burke, let Burke drive, and woke up shattered for it.

The defense had him first, still on cross, and it built the picture it wants. Rodolfo was running the in-car computer that morning, and he was good at it. His car was the closest unit to the stolen Jeep when the alerts started landing. He walked the jury across the defense's own GPS map. A unit already in the area, getting the same flock information the same instant dispatch did, speeding up to close the distance, watching the suspect Jeep's location update toward the Detroit line. And the Detroit line is the whole point of the hurry. Warren officers are not allowed to start a pursuit or a stop once a car crosses Eight Mile into Detroit, so there is a real reason to reach a stolen vehicle before it gets there. On the defense's framing, none of this was even a pursuit, because under the department's own definition a pursuit does not begin until the suspect is actively trying to get away, and you cannot flee from a car you have never seen.

Then the prosecutor took him back, put up the cruiser's own in-car video, and turned Burke's most loyal witness into the state's witness for a few minutes. Frame by frame, Rodolfo read his own speedometer off the screen as the cruiser tore east down Nine Mile in the dark. 44 through a construction zone. 68. 97. 102. The whole way, no lights, no siren, nothing but headlights. And then the admission that lands harder than any single number. On Nine Mile, the cruiser was nowhere near the stolen Jeep, and there was no way that Jeep could have seen them coming. So there was no tactical reason to keep the lights off at that point. Rodolfo agreed. They kept them off anyway.

The defense got the last word and turned the silence back into a choice that broke no rule. Either officer could have flipped the lights and siren on, and they chose not to. Asked whether anything Burke did in the moments before the crash struck him as a violation of department policy, Rodolfo said no. And then the loyalty, which the state will use to discount every favorable word out of his mouth, and which is impossible not to feel anyway. Asked whether he would ride with Burke again, he did not hesitate. He would do it again without a second thought.

WATCH PART 6 ON YOUTUBE Burke's Partner Admits They Chose to Keep the Lights Off With No One Around to See Them | Pt 6

Then they showed the jury what the speed did

Openings and arguments are one thing. Two pathologists describing, in clinical detail, what a hundred-mile-an-hour crash does to a human body is another thing entirely. This is the part of day two the jury does not get to put down.

Dr. Cynthia Beisser performed the autopsy on Cedric Hayden, the driver. Thirty years as a forensic pathologist before she ever came to Macomb County. The defense did not fight her credentials and did not fight her findings, because the dispute in this case was never about how these men died. It was about who caused it, and that is not a question a medical examiner answers.

What she found is hard to hear, and I am going to say it plainly and then move on, because these were people, not exhibits. The force of the crash severed Hayden's spine and spinal cord between the first two vertebrae. In plain terms, it nearly took his head off his body. The part of the brain that runs breathing and heartbeat was torn. Broken ribs, a broken bone in the neck, bruised lungs, a torn liver. These are the injuries of catastrophic force, and the cause of death was exactly what you would expect from them. Blunt force trauma.

And then the number the defense built its entire opening around went into evidence, through the state's own witness. Beisser sent Hayden's blood for testing, and it came back at a .198 blood alcohol level. Roughly two and a half times Michigan's legal limit. That is the proof of impairment the defense needs for its whole theory that a drunk driver, not the officer's speed, caused this crash. It is in front of the jury now, it cannot be taken back, and it arrived inside the prosecution's case instead of the defense's.

The state did what it could with it, which was not much, because there was not much to do. Beisser confirmed the alcohol did not kill Hayden. The blunt force did. That rules out something nobody in this case ever argued. She agreed the injuries are consistent with a high-speed crash, and even there she was careful to say speed is for the crash investigator to work out, not the pathologist. So the number that drives causation is in the record. The witness who can tie it to the crash is still coming.

WATCH PART 7 ON YOUTUBE Medical Examiner Testifies Cedric Hayden Was Driving With a .198 Blood Alcohol Level | Pt 7

Then came the passenger, and this is the testimony that ought to sit with the jury longest, because there is no theory in this case that touches him. Dr. Catherine Perez performed the autopsy on DeJuan Pettis. The injuries were concentrated in the head and they were devastating. Bleeding on and under the brain, tears at the base of the brain, a fracture running ear to ear across the bottom of the skull, his skull and spine pulled apart. His chest was crushed as well. The cause of death, multiple injuries. The manner, accident.

When the prosecutor finished, the defense said it had no questions. Think about why. Pettis was not driving. He was not drinking behind a wheel. He did not turn across anyone's path. The entire causation fight the defense is building, the .198, the suspended license, the unsignaled turn, none of it reaches the man in the passenger seat. He was riding home next to his oldest friend. Whatever happened on Schoenherr Road cost two lives, not one, and one of those lives belonged to a man no version of this story can put a finger on.

WATCH PART 8 ON YOUTUBE Medical Examiner Describes the Catastrophic Injuries DeJuan Pettis Suffered in the Crash | Pt 8

The rulebook the state leaned on

The back half of the day moved off the bodies and onto the rules, and it put three Warren officers on the stand who, between them, handed each side some of its best ammunition.

If you are looking for the reason twelve people get to decide this case instead of a judge, the supervisor is it. Lieutenant Timothy Kulhanek runs Warren's internal affairs now. The night of the crash he was the patrol sergeant over Burke and Rodolfo, and he gave both sides exactly what they came for.

For the defense, he validated the threat and the technique. The armed ATM crew had been the talk of the shift for a week. Stealing ATMs, using stolen cars, committing armed robberies, working the early morning hours in the south end of the city, the same window and the same area as this stolen Jeep with guns in it. Kulhanek agreed that is the kind of thing he expects his officers to take seriously, and an officer who blew it off would have heard about it from him. He went further. He testified that he too would have kept his lights off closing on a suspect, because announcing yourself can set up an ambush, and that speeding up to catch a vehicle is routine police work.

But the prosecutor walked him to the line the state needs, and he did not flinch from it. His own emergency driving training tops out around 40 miles an hour, not 100. You do not need lights and sirens to drive fast. You need them to drive lawfully outside the normal rules, and state law decides when an officer can do that. There are no consequences, none, for an officer who fails to catch a flock-hit vehicle. And the one that cuts deepest. It is not an officer's job to catch criminals at any cost, and an officer should not put the public's lives at risk to chase down a stolen car. Both of those things are true at the same time. That is the whole problem the jury has been handed.

There was a quieter moment in his testimony, and it matters. When Kulhanek reached the scene, he found Burke up and walking but not right. Bleeding from the arm, eyes glassed over, face blank, speech mumbled, going into shock. Not the man he had known for years. Remember the body camera moment from day one, the muted audio and the officer telling Burke to stay quiet, the thing the state laid out as something that might be a cover-up. A supervisor who knew Burke well just told the jury the man at that scene was barely there. Whether that silence was an officer hiding something or a friend protecting a man in shock is the jury's call, but day two gave them a lot to set against the darker read.

WATCH PART 9 ON YOUTUBE Burke's Patrol Sergeant Testifies Officers Are Trained to Drive at 40 Not 100 | Pt 9

The technology lieutenant looked like a housekeeping witness and turned into the defense's strongest shield of the day. Lieutenant Brandon Roy runs Warren's cameras. He gave the state one hard floor and then spent the rest of his time helping the other side.

The floor first. The cruiser's in-car camera is set to switch itself on automatically when the car crosses a speed threshold, and on the day of this crash that threshold was 90 miles an hour. Sit with that. The reason there is any in-car video of this crash at all is that the cruiser crossed 90. The footage does not just show the speed. Its very existence proves it.

Then the defense went to work, and it was effective. Roy explained, more than once, that a camera is not an officer's eyes. It faces forward and stays fixed while a driver turns his head. It does not show what an officer sees at a distance. And at night it sees differently than a person does, smearing lights the human eye would resolve. That is aimed straight at the hardest question in this whole case. The white vehicle the cruiser is closing on in that footage may be something the camera caught and the driver never clearly saw. Then the beat that matters most. Roy told the jury that officers in this department cross 80 miles an hour so routinely that the automatic speed alerts became a daily flood, so many of them that the department rerouted them to a separate system. That goes right at the charge. Gross negligence is not about whether Burke was speeding. It is about whether his driving was so far outside the bounds of normal police work that it shows a disregard for whether people get hurt. If the department's own officers cross 80 every day, the defense gets to argue that a triple-digit response is closer to the everyday reality of the job than to a crime. And on the body camera, Roy handed the defense the rest of what it wanted. Muting a private conversation between officers is allowed. An officer who has been pulled away from a scene is not required to keep recording.

WATCH PART 10 ON YOUTUBE Warren's Own Technology Lieutenant Testifies Officers Routinely Drive Over 80 Miles an Hour | Pt 10

The day ended on the rulebook itself, and on the cleanest documentary blow the state has landed sitting right next to the cleanest shield the defense has raised, both out of the same witness.

Captain Paul Houtos wrote the flock-hit language into Warren's pursuit policy. He explained how it came to be, during a 2024 accreditation review, and how it went out to every officer through the department's document system that July, with a daily reminder until it was signed. Then the prosecutor delivered the blow. Houtos reviewed the records, and Burke never signed it. Published in July, due to be acknowledged by September 11, and Burke's record shows it unsigned. His partner Rodolfo acknowledged it. That is the closest the state has come to showing Burke did not follow the rules, and it is a clean, documented fact a jury can hold onto.

And then the defense took the same witness and read the fine print into the record, and it cuts hard the other way. First, policy is not law. Only the commissioner adopts it. No legislature, no debate, no vetting. Second, the flock-hit rule the state is leaning on treats a flock hit as a moderate-speed response only when it is a bare felony hit with nothing else behind it, and the defense put the briefing back in front of the jury, the armed crew, the guns, the early morning hour, and asked whether all of that is the kind of supporting information that could justify a higher speed. The captain agreed it could. And then the most damaging part of the day. The defense had Houtos read the policy's own disclaimer aloud. In its own words, the policy is for internal use only. It is not meant to expand an officer's civil or criminal liability. Breaking it can only be the basis for discipline inside the department. The document the state is using to suggest Burke broke the rules says, on its own face, that breaking it is a personnel matter, not a crime.

The state recovered the one principle that keeps its case standing. State law beats the policy, and an officer has to obey the law like any other citizen. That is a real answer, and it points at where this case actually lives, which was never the Warren rulebook. It is the gross negligence statute. But the document the prosecution leaned on is now carrying language that says, in black and white, that breaking it is not a crime.

WATCH PART 11 ON YOUTUBE The Captain Who Wrote the Pursuit Policy Says It Cannot Make Burke a Criminal | Pt 11

What day two did not settle

The fight this whole case turns on still has not happened.

The .198 is in evidence now. So is the suspended license. But whether Hayden's impairment, or an unsignaled turn, or anything the two men in that Durango did could have changed the outcome at the speed that cruiser was traveling, that is the causation question, and it belongs to the crash reconstruction expert, who has not testified. The white vehicle on the cruiser's camera is the hinge the entire case swings on, and the defense put a real dent in it on day two by getting the department's own technology expert to agree the camera is not the driver's eyes. A dent is not an answer, though. The answer is still coming.

For now, the state has made the speed lethal and made it human. Two pathologists told the jury what a hundred-mile-an-hour crash does to a body. The cruiser's own camera exists only because it crossed 90. A partner who trusted Burke completely conceded there was no one to hide from when they ran dark. And Burke never signed the policy his partner did. The defense, meanwhile, locked in the .198, normalized the speed by showing the department's officers cross 80 every day, and got the captain who wrote the rulebook to read aloud that it cannot make anyone a criminal. It is still holding its causation case for the witnesses who can carry it.

I say a version of this after every day of this trial, and I am going to keep saying it. Nothing that happened on day two is a verdict. The autopsies are not a verdict. The unsigned policy is not a verdict. My father spent his life on the idea that the protections in the Constitution are not rewards we hand out to the people we happen to like. They are the rules, and they cover the unpopular defendant exactly the way they would cover you. James Burke is about as unpopular as a defendant gets right now. That is precisely why this is the case that tells us whether those rules still mean what they say.

If you would rather watch the whole day for yourself instead of taking my read on it, both full-day versions are right here.

WATCH THE FULL DAY Michigan v. James Burke, Day 2, Live Broadcast WATCH THE FULL DAY, NO BREAKS Michigan v. James Burke, Day 2, No Breaks Edition

The reconstruction expert and the toxicologist are where the causation fight finally lands. That is the testimony I will be watching closest, and it is the testimony that comes next.