CENTENNIAL, Colo. — Katie Medley, nine months pregnant and crouching between the seats of a movie theater filling with tear gas, gunfire and screams, looked at her husband Caleb’s bloody face and told a friend, “He’s dead, he’s dead.”

Kaylan Bailey was 13 that night, sitting with a group of family and friends in the midst of the 421 people watching a midnight “Batman” premiere. She thought she was witnessing a prank until she realized bullets were flying past her.

She reached over to Veronica Moser-Sullivan, the 6-year-old girl she had been baby-sitting earlier, and realized she wasn’t breathing. “I was screaming Veronica’s name,” she remembered.

They were the among the first of many prosecution witnesses in the death penalty trial of James Holmes, and their gripping testimony Tuesday made clear the state’s determination to make sure jurors know the carnage Holmes caused inside the suburban Denver theater on July 20, 2012.

Judge Carlos A. Samour Jr. warned jurors as the trial opened not to let sympathy and emotion influence their judgment. The defense team has conceded Holmes was the killer, hoping to focus not on the crime itself or its lingering damage, but on the only question left for jurors to resolve: whether Holmes was legally insane at the time.

But on this first long day of testimony, the judge repeatedly turned away defense objections to particularly gruesome and tragic details. Defense attorneys did not question any of the 10 witnesses — nine people who were in the theater, and Aurora police Sgt. Michael Hawkins, who told of barreling to the scene at 100 mph and then carrying dying Veronica to an ambulance.

“I looked down at her and I realized that she was gone,” Hawkins said, his strong, clear voice fading.

Defense attorney Katherine Spengler argued grisly photos, a 911 recording of shrieks and screams, and the words “bloody victim” a witness wrote on a diagram of the theater served only to inflame the jury. The judge dismissed her motions, reasoning the evidence is relevant and fairly depicts a horrific crime.

Tuesday was Day One of testimony in a trial expected to last four months or more. If the prosecution keeps this up, the cumulative weight of the victims’ suffering could make the defense job even more difficult.

Perhaps the most riveting testimony was also the shortest so far, coming from Caleb Medley, an aspiring comedian who survived the shotgun blast Holmes fired at his face but lost an eye and was left unable to walk and barely able to speak.

Prosecutors asked him only two questions: Was he married to Katie? Was he at the theater that night?

From a wheelchair, he answered the first with a breathy, grunted “Yeah.”

To the second, he tapped out his answer on a poster board with the letters of the alphabet: Y, E, S.