CHICORA — Attorneys for the state and the defense clashed over video evidence at a preliminary hearing Tuesday in the case of a man accused of molesting three young girls at the day care center his wife operates at their Oakland Township home.

On one side, prosecutor Russ Karl claimed the footage showed 66-year-old Roger L. Young having inappropriate contact with two of the girls, ages 3 and 4.

Hardly, countered defense attorney Michael Zunder on the other side. The video, he argued, offered nothing to suggest his client committed any unlawful acts or criminal behavior.

In the end, District Judge Lewis Stoughton, who found himself locking horns with Zunder during the 90-minute hearing, ordered Young to stand trial on charges of indecent assault and corrupting the morals of minors.

State police last summer charged Young with fondling the alleged victims at the Patti Cake Child Care Center on Route 68. His wife, Patti Young, runs the facility.

Police said surveillance video at the center showed Young molesting at least two girls in 2010. Another girl in 2011 reported that the defendant also groped her.

Trooper Joshua Anderson filed the case after reviewing thousands of hours of footage recorded between October 2010 and June 2011.

Anderson at Tuesday’s hearing came armed with a laptop computer he used to show eight video clips captured on the day care’s surveillance system.

The video was not shown to the public or the media in Stoughton’s courtroom.

Rather, Anderson presented what amounted to a private showing at the bench for the judge, prosecutor, defense attorney and defendant.

The officer also offered commentary about what the video clips purportedly showed. Zunder objected, repeatedly.

“The trooper cannot testify what he says the video shows,” Zunder told Stoughton. “It’s up to the video to speak for itself.”

Anderson, while streaming each clip on the laptop, described a variety of alleged action involving Young at the center.

The defendant can be seen touching the girl’s private parts through their clothing and having them touch his genitals, according to the trooper’s testimony.

The clips, Anderson stated, also show Young lifting up the shirt of one of the children to expose her chest and kissing at least one of the girls on the face.

While leaning over the bench to watch the video, Zunder often looked exasperated and shook his head, apparently indicating his disagreement with Anderson’s interpretation of what the clips showed.

Zunder’s cross-examination of the trooper was at times testy, with Stoughton warning the attorney to be more respectful.

During Zunder’s questioning, Anderson acknowledged that in some of the clips he could not see if Young’s hands were touching any of the girls.

The trooper also admitted he never interviewed the alleged victims. Instead, he relied on a forensic interview by a Butler County Children and Youth Services caseworker to help get a search warrant for the surveillance video.

Anderson told Karl, an assistant district attorney for the county, that his investigation entailed the review of a year and a half’s worth of video from the day care center.

During the review, he said, two days of video in May 2011 appeared to have “been tampered with.”

One of those days corresponded with a letter that Patti Young wrote to the family of one of the alleged victims in response to the girl telling her mother that she had touched Young’s genitals.

The letter, Anderson said, explained what the child touched was Play-Doh.

However, investigators were never able to see for themselves what happened because video of that day — May 9, 2011 — had been “erased from the hard drive,” Anderson testified.

The trooper was the lone witness to testify. Karl, after the hearing, acknowledged that none of the alleged victims were at Stoughton’s office.

Under state law, hearsay rules are relaxed at preliminary hearings, allowing police officers to testify about their interactions with other witnesses or victims and for the officers to to summarize their investigation and the findings.

Still, Zunder protested at the hearing, arguing that Young deserved the right to confront his accusers.

The defendant remains free on $50,000 unsecured bail. As a condition of his bail, he is barred from the day care center.

In January, Karl and Zunder agreed to allow Young to take a lie-detector test to determine if the case would move to trial. But District Attorney Richard Goldinger later nixed the deal, saying he had not been consulted and never approved of it.