Stefan Tate’s trial began in earnest the following morning at eight o’clock sharp. The jury of eight women and four men had been empaneled the week before, and Judge Erasmus P. Varney lived up to his reputation for keeping his courtroom moving at a brisk pace.
The place was packed for the opening arguments. Our family turned out in force. Pinkie was there with his mother. I sat with Aunt Hattie and Patty Converse, directly behind Naomi and Stefan, who came into court acting rattled.
He seemed particularly upset by the people sitting behind the prosecution. Cece Turnbull was there, drawn, weak, and holding on to Bree’s hand. Bree had spent the whole night with her and made sure she’d shown up sober.
Chief of police Randy Sherman sat on Cece’s other side and kept glancing at Bree, as if he were trying to figure out how she fit into the equation. Behind them were several reporters up from Raleigh and Winston-Salem, and another from the Associated Press.
Harry and Virginia Caine, the well-scrubbed couple I’d seen on Cece’s porch the prior day, were on hand in the third row. Her parents were dressed for business and seemed relieved to see their daughter’s sober condition.
Stark County Sheriff’s Office detective Guy Pedelini came in just as the opening arguments began and sat in the back near city homicide detectives Joe Frost and Lou Carmichael.
District attorney Delilah Strong gave the prosecution’s opening argument with Matt Brady as her cocounsel. Strong’s presentation of the case against my cousin was clear, concise, and damning.
She depicted Stefan Tate as a troubled individual thrown out of several schools and jobs because of substance abuse, then as a liar who hid his past on his application to teach in the Starksville school system, and then as a teacher who’d relapsed, dealt drugs to his students, and raped a student before sexually assaulting and butchering Rashawn Turnbull after the young boy rejected him.
When Strong was done, the jury members were taking lethal glances at my cousin. Cece Turnbull went berserk, screaming, “You’ll go to hell for what you did to my boy, Stefan Tate!”
It took Bree and a bailiff to get the victim’s mother out of the courtroom. When they brought Cece past her parents, she was bent over and weeping, and Harry and Virginia Caine looked tortured and lost.
Naomi asked Judge Varney for a recess and to instruct the jury to ignore Cece’s outburst. The judge gave the instructions but denied the recess and demanded she make her case.
My niece got uncertainly to her feet, saying, “The district attorney paints Stefan Tate as a drug-fueled homicidal maniac. Nothing could be further from the truth.”
Gaining confidence, Naomi depicted my young cousin as a man who’d gotten off track, fought demons, and kept the circumstances of his addictions private on his school application because it was his right under the law. He’d come home to Starksville and found his passion as a teacher, and he cared deeply about his students. She described the drug overdoses at the school and Stefan’s efforts to fight and expose the drug dealers.
“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, it is the defense’s contention that Stefan Tate was getting very close to uncovering the presence of a major drug ring operating in and around Starksville,” Naomi went on. “For that, my client was framed, as a drug dealer himself, as a rapist, and as the brutal murderer of a boy he loved like a son.
“When you’ve heard the hard evidence, when you see how manufactured it all looks on close examination, you’ll realize without a doubt that Stefan Tate is no drug dealer, no rapist, and most certainly no murderer.”