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Two witnesses recall tragic death in Silverton

Account claims Mike McFarland said he threw bottle back

SILVERTON – On the third day of the trial of Mike McFarland, the prosecution put two witnesses critical to its case on the stand: Ladonna Jaramillo, the neighbor who called 911 when Mike McFarland brought her into the house where his wife lay without a pulse and covered in blood, and San Juan County Sheriff Bruce Conrad, who arrived on the scene shortly afterward.

McFarland is accused of manslaughter and second-degree assault in the death of his wife, Jessica McFarland, on June 6, 2014, at their Silverton home.

On Wednesday, defense attorney Joel Fry questioned Jaramillo at length about a claim she made to investigators but not to 911 dispatchers.

She testified that the night of Jessica McFarland’s death, “(Mike McFarland) said she threw a bottle, and he threw it back, and it hit her in the throat.”

Jaramillo didn’t budge an inch, but Fry’s strategy of grilling her about why she didn’t immediately relay his statement to the emergency dispatcher seemed to make inroads with the jury.

Once the lawyers finished questioning her, three jurors submitted further questions. One juror asked why Jaramillo remembered some things but not others.

Conrad testified that when he arrived on the scene, it was chaotic. By the time he arrived, he said, if Jessica McFarland was not already dead, she was dying, because her wounds were producing no blood.

Fry questioned Conrad at length about apparent discrepancies between his testimony on the stand – specifically, his claim that Mike McFarland initially offered no explanation for his wife’s injuries – and various transcripts. He focused on one particular transcript of Conrad’s interview with Mike McFarland in the hours after his arrest in which he told Conrad that his wife “was bleeding from the neck because she was throwing (expletive).”

When Conrad responded that Mike McFarland had not been consistent on that point throughout the interview, Fry said, “It must have been a pretty difficult situation for him, knowing that his wife was dead.”

At one point, Fry asks Conrad whether he had shared the confidential autopsy results with Jessica McFarland’s family, then told them not to tell anyone. Conrad said no to both questions.

Some of Wednesday’s most powerful testimony came from the state’s last witness, Dr. Robert Kurtzman, the forensic pathologist who performed the autopsy on Jessica McFarland and determined her cause of death.

He said while he found traces of alcohol, amphetamine, methamphetamine, sedatives, THC and methadone in her system, she was killed by getting hit with a glass object.

He said Jessica McFarland’s death was a homicide, and, given the physics, the suggestion that her injuries possibly could have been self-inflicted “almost seems absurd.”

“I don’t see how it would be physically possible for someone to take a glass and produce that injury to themselves,” Kurtzman testified.

Sixth Judicial District Attorney Todd Risberg asked, “Is it painful to die that way?”

“It wouldn’t be an easy death,” Kurtzman said. “She was alive for a sufficient period of time for the blood to fill up the cavity and collapse the lung,” he said, which might have taken anywhere from 10 or 15 minutes to 55 minutes.

The idea that Jessica McFarland might have been alive for up to 55 minutes after suffering the injuries that killed her drew gasps from some in the courtroom.

“The injuries that she sustained wouldn’t be immediately incapacitating. She essentially exsanguinated – not over seconds, but over minutes,” he said.

Kurtzman’s testimony will resume at 8:30 a.m. Thursday, when Fry will have a chance to cross-examine him.

cmcallister@durangoherald.com

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