Testimony focuses on rifle during second day of homicide trial
The .22-caliber rifle used to kill Thomas “T.J.” Stockman was the focus of testimony Tuesday morning in the homicide trial of Jeremey Sickenberger.
Police have said that Sickenberger, Stockman and several other people were gathered at Sickenberger’s mobile home in Muddy Creek Township when Sickenberger shot Stockman in the side of his chest with a .22-caliber rifle. From the beginning, Sickenberger has claimed the shootingwas an accident.
On Tuesday, the second day of testimony in the case, state police Cpl. Robert Hagins testified that an accidental discharge of the weapon was possible, but only under specific circumstances.
Hagins said the rifle would have to have a cartridge chambered and its external hammer — the mechanism which strikes a cartridge’s firing pin, resulting in a bullet being discharged — placed in the fully lowered position. The hammer would then have to be struck “sharply” from behind for it to fire without using its trigger.
Defense attorney Joseph Smith seized on that testimony, as well as Hagins’ acknowledgment that the gun — a .22 caliber Rossi slide action rifle — had an “extremely unusual” functional defect.
Under questioning from Smith, Hagins acknowledged that he found a mangled cartridge in a part of the guns’ receiver that normally doesn’t accept bullets. Hagins said he had to disassemble the weapon to remove the cartridge, but that the jam had apparently not prevented the gun from firing.
The weapon had been in the custody of state police as well as another forensic testing lab before Hagins received it, he testified, but there was no way for him to tell how long the mangled cartridge had been there.
Prosecutors also called Paul Pfaff, the owner of the gun, to the stand Tuesday. Pfaff testified that he had left the gun in Sickenberger’s room days earlier with the hammer fully forward, but no round in the chamber.
Pfaff also testified that he told Sickenberger the gun had live rounds in its magazine, but Smith pressed him on whether he’d actually told his friend that the gun was loaded. Smith referenced a transcript of Pfaff’s statement to state police in which he told troopers that he was “90 percent sure” that the gun wasn’t loaded, but that it did have bullets in its magazine.
Smith pressed Pfaff to account for what appeared to be inconsistencies in his statements to police, and Pfaff testified that he doesn’t consider a gun with rounds in its magazine to be loaded.
Testimony is expected to continue all week.
