Live blog: Jason Young trial ends week with explosive testimony

NBC17.com is live blogging the Jason Young murder trial. Here is Friday’s coverage from Wake Superior Court in Raleigh.

Friday's testimony was stunning - beginning with emotional testimony from Linda Fisher, the mother of Michelle, to information from one of Michelle's high school friends and concluding with a pyschologist who met with Michelle Young only weeks before she died.

Court ended early and is now out for the day.

1:04 p.m.: Kimball Sargant, a psychologist, said Michelle Young came to see her Oct. 27 and cried the entire hour she was with her.

“When she came in and she sat down she started crying,” Sargant said. “She cried the entire session.”

Sargant said Young was there to “get her life and herself straightened out.”

“She was pregnant with a baby due in March. And she had a very conflicted relationship with her husband,” Sargant testified.

“She had to figure out what she was going to do to fix herself and make it better.”

Sargant testified that Michelle wanted Jason to come to counseling but he refused, saying was with her, not him.

Sargant said Michelle expressed concerns about Jason’s drinking. She said Michelle told her he would get drunk at N.C. State games and then they would fight at home. She said that while they divided chores, he didn’t clean the house until the end of the weekend, which upset her.

“She said that he was always complaining that they didn’t have sex enough and they didn’t have sex as much as friends who didn’t have children,” Sargant testified.

She said Michelle told her the couple had had sex about twice a week before children.

“Now it was down to about once a week,” Sargant said. She said Jason had wanted to have sex that morning, but Michelle was busy and refused.

“She felt somewhat inadequate,” Sargant said. “She had been sexually assaulted when she wasin college. So she had had sex forced on her.

“And one of the issues was when she had sex with him she felt like he was forcing himself on her.”

Sargant said Michelle told her her other relationships with men had not been that way.

Sargant also testified that Michelle told her money was an issue in the marriage, and that Jason wanted to do things she felt they could not afford.

Sargant said she and Michelle talked about a plan in which Michelle would envision what her life would look like in the future, but she never heard from Michelle again.

11:47 a.m.: Wow, stunning testimony from a high school friend of Michelle Young. Jennifer Powers of Hoboken, N.J., said she got a call from a very upset Michelle in the summer of 2003.

She said Michelle was crying and told Powers, "I'm pregnant."

But she said Jason Young was not happy about it. 

She remembers Michelle telling her, "Jason wants me to abort the baby or he says he will resent me and the baby for therest of our lives."

Powers said she remembers Michelle saying that Jason was "the one" and she couldn't understand why Jason wasn't excited about the child.

She also said Michelle had smoked some socially, but that she stopped after she started dating Jason Young.

“She explained to me that Jason hated smoking,” Powers explained.

That's a significant point - remember, Jason testified in the earlier trial that he smoked a cigar outside the Hampton Inn hotel the night Michelle died.

Powers also said she got a long email from Michelle Young on Oct. 4, 2003, sharing an email Michelle had received from Jason. In that email, Jason had outlined why he did not want Linda Fisher to spend Thanksgiving with his family in Brevard, and why he wanted to limit her visit on Christmas.

Michelle said she wanted Powers' input, and also said, "Welcome to my world of fighting with Jason. He loves to go below the belt."

The defense did not cross-examine Powers.

11:43 a.m.: Linda Fisher just finished testifying. Her testimony overall was not nearly as emotional as in the first trial.

Interesting point, though - when she finished, the defense declined to cross examine her, and she was dismissed.

10:53 a.m.: Linda Fisher, mother of Michelle, remembers how Michelle seemed to change late in her life.

“She was always peppy and alive and smiling … and she just kept getting more and more sad and introverted,” she said.

She vividly remembered being at her daughter Meredith’s house in Fuquay-Varina after Michelle was killed.

“He looked like a 5-year-old boy. It was strange to see. The whole house felt cold. There was a distance. Everybody was separated,” she said.

She said she and Jason, who refused to talk to police, were at the house that night while others went downtown to talk to police.

“The only thing I can remember Jason saying to me, and this is after everybody left the house, we were sitting in the living room and he said two things.

“He said, ‘My lawyer told me I can’t talk to anyone, not even you.’

“I was I like, Your lawyer? You got a lawyer?

“And the other statement was, I’m going to take a hit on the house.’

“And I was like, What? You’re going to take a hit on the house? All I’m thinking is, Michelle’s dead.”

9:51 a.m.: Linda Fisher, the mother of Michelle Young, is now on the stand.

 "Michelle aways wanted to be married, have a family, do it the right way," she said.

"She did not want to be that person who was pregnant before she got married. But that's the way it happened."

Fisher remembers talking to Jason about the prospect of them getting married.

“I told him, ‘If you don’t love her, then don’t marry her. She’ll survive.’”

Asked by prosecutor Howard Cummings how he responded, she said, “There were no words spoken back to me.”

They were married in a small civil ceremony on Aug. 12, 2003. The bigger celebration came Oct. 4, 2003, at the Longview Center in downtown Raleigh.