Live blog: Jury hears Jason Young's testimony from first trial

The Jason Young trial resumed Tuesday in Wake County Superior Court. It is the 12^th day of testimony in the retrial.

5:01 p.m.: Jason Young said he went to the hotel on Nov. 2, 2006, checked in, went to his room and used the key card to get in, according to his testimony that was replayed in court Tuesday.

The prosecution brought a video of his testimony into evidence on Tuesday. His testimony in the first trial was a surprise, and the prosecution seemed unprepared when given the chance to question him.

This time, though, the prosection appears on offensive, bringing up the testimony itself in an apparent move to rebut some of what Young said. He is charged with murdering his pregnant wife, Michelle, on Nov. 3, 2006.

Jason Young, in the testimony shown Tuesday, said he did not need a key card when he went downstairs to smoke a cigar, he testified. He said he was nervous about the sales call and also had left his computer charger in his car.

He said most hotel doors “are pretty heavy and have a pretty good pulling mechanism.”

In this case, he said, the door didn’t pull itself flush, and he could leave it slightly ajar so he didn’t need his key card to get back in.

“I just let it as it was,” he testified.

He said he went down the hall – a hotel security camera shows him with water and a newspaper in his hand – and came upon the west door.

“I was going to smoke a cigar. I would occassionally smoke a cigar and your mouth gets kind of dry,” he said.

He said he would need a key card to get back into the hotel and didn’t have it.

“The bush is right there,” he said of a bush outside the hotel. “You can open that door and reach something so it doesn’t lock you out.”

Then, he said, “I smoked the cigar and then went back to my room.”

He said he did not ask for a wake-up call that morning because he is a light sleeper and didn’t like being interrupted.

Asked directly by defense attorney Bryan Collins if he had been in King, N.C., that night, as Gracie Dahms Calhoun has testified, he said, “No sir, I was in my hotel room.”

4:51 p.m.: The prosection continued to play Jason Young's testimony from the first trial. 

3:34 p.m.: The prosecution is still playing Jason Young's testimony from the first trial. In that testimony, Jason Young said:

* "Absolutely not" when asked if he ever got physical with Michelle.

* "I wanted to have another baby and I wanted the family to grow."

* He never thought about divorce and didn't want to divorce her. He said he would say, "Just divorce me" in anger but never sought a lawyer.

* He knew his relationship with Michelle Money "was wrong" and said, "We never dreamed it would be found out." But he said he loved Michelle Young and his family and she loved hers. "We really knew it had to stop," he testified.

* He left a printout about the Coach bag at his home, and intended to take it with him to Virginia.

2:50 p.m.: The prosecution is now showing Jason Young's testimony from the first trial. Young took the stand late in the trial in a surprise move, one that appeared to take the prosecution off guard.

This time, it looks like the prosecution is introducing his testimony so it can address the issues he brought up.

Defense attorney Bryan Collins asked, in the video, if Jason loved Michelle, and he said he did.

"Did you kill your wife, Michelle?"

"No, sir."

"Where you there when it happened?"

"No sir."

"Do you know who did it?"

"No sir."

Jason, on the video, talks about how much he loved Micihelle. 

“We always were jokey with each other. Cutting up. Being silly. She was the serious type and I was the loosen her up type,” he said.

They eventually moved in together, and then Michelle got pregnant.

“We were both very shocked. Eye-opening. Like, whoa,” he said. “It wasn’t planed. It was a surprise. But it was a good surprise.”

He said the pregnancy "didn’t cause us to get married. It certainly expedited it."

Jason said both he and Michelle were passionate, hard-headed people and they would have heated arguments.

He said they argued more when she was pregnant, to the point of yelling.

"It would go both ways," he said. "And sometimes I would pout."

Young said on the video he was “ecstatic” when Michelle was pregnant with a second child.

“I was always pushing for having another baby,” he said on tape. I wanted Cassidy to have someone in an age range that she could play with. I wanted to have another.”

He admitted he had issues with his mother-in-law, Linda Fisher.

"I didn't want to be living with my mother-in-law," he testified.

He said they had a "pretty signficant difference" in personality, with him being from the mountains and her from Long Island.

"She could be a bit domineering," he said. ...

On the video, Jason is asked, Did you ever get physical with her?

"Absolutely not," he said.

He said they fought "more openly" than most couples.

12:59 p.m.: Sgt. Richard Spivey testified about the phone calls made from Jason Young's phone the month leading up to the murder. Young called his mother often, sometimes five times a day. But on Nov. 3, the day Michelle's body was discovered, he made 28 calls to Pat Young.

12:24 p.m.: Tom Riha, the global director of men's product development for the Hush Puppy company, is now on the stand. Because he is in from out of state, the court had Sgt. Richard Spivey stand down so he could testify.

Riha said the shoe print he was shown from the crime scene matched a sole that Hush Puppy made for shoes called the Sealy, the Bellville and the Orbital designs.

He said the Orbital brand - a slip-on - was made specifically for DSW and was not sold to other retailers. Remember, the prosecution has introduced evidence that the Youngs bought a Hush Puppy shoe at DSW on July 4, 2005.

That pair of shoes has not been found.

On cross examination, Bryan Collins pushed the fact that it was possible that some other company made a knock-off brand that would match that sole. Riha said that was possible.

9:49 a.m.: Richard Spivey of the Wake County Sheriff’s Office is the first witness Tuesday morning.

He became the lead investigator in April 2007 and started to piece together information on the case, looking back at receipts and other bits of information.

Spivey showed the court a picture of Jason Young in the Hampton Inn around midnight of Nov. 2, 2006.

He made some important points about the camera in the west stairwell.

He said from reviewing the frames, the camera was last working at 11:20 p.m. on Nov. 2, 2006. 

It was still black until 5:50 a.m. on the morning of Nov. 3. In a couple of frames, Spivey testified, you then see night clerk Keith Hicks in the camera. Hicks has testified that he found the camera off, and that he and Elmer Goad went to repair it.

At 6:34 a.m., he said, the camera was pointed at a different again. That continued until 6:37 a.m., when "you can see somebody's there," Spivey said.

That, he said, is consistent with Goad fixing the camera again.

That timeline is important to the prosecution's case. Hicks and Goad, in their testimony, had sort of estimated the time. But if Gracie Dahms Calhoun is accurate in saying Jason Young was at her store around 5:30 a.m. that night, then that would be consistent with Young being at the hotel around 6:30 a.m.

According to Mapquest, it is 45 miles from King to Hillsville.

Much of Spivey's testimony so far has focused on when and where Jason Young bought gas, the distance between the different points, and other part of police investigative work.