POMEROY — Paula Rizer became ill on the witness stand Friday, just as she began to emotionally recount an alleged altercation between her and her late husband on the day she shot him.

Rizer was treated by Meigs County Emergency Medical Services at the county sheriff’s department.

Rizer took the stand Friday afternoon and said she was sexually abused as a child, and that she and her husband, Kenny Rizer, Sr., had been experiencing sexual difficulties and had quarrelled about a number of issues on April 3, the day he was found shot to death in the living room of their Lebanon Township home.

The trial in Meigs County Common Pleas Court began Tuesday, and the defense began calling their witnesses on Thursday afternoon. Judge Fred W. Crow III is presiding in the case. Prosecuting Attorney Colleen Williams and Assistant Matthew Donohue represent the state.

Brent Turvey, a forensic scientist based in Alaska, presented details from his report that claims the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation conducted an inadequate investigation of the crime scene, that Kenny Rizer, Sr. was out of his chair when at least most of the five rounds were fired at him, and that an altercation had led to the shooting.

The marriage to Kenny Rizer, Sr. was Mrs. Rizer’s third, she told the jury Friday. They married in 1996, and later that year, moved to Springfield. They returned to the Lovett Road home in 1999, and had a close relationship, she said.

In fact, other than her mother, Kenny Rizer, Sr. was the only person Paula Rizer ever told about her sexual abuse at the hands of her father.

Since his retirement from the Ohio Carpenters union, her husband had suffered slowly deteriorating health, Rizer said. In addition to physical pain, the couple was also struggling with sexual dysfunction, which she said led her husband to be sexually agressive with her.

She said he was only occasionally verbally abusive, and had, at least once, been physically violent with her.

On April 3, Rizer said Friday, her husband had tried to initiate sexual contact with her, but was physically unable to have intercourse.

“He said, ‘it is time to do your duty,’” Rizer said, meaning he wanted to have intercourse.

She said she and her husband later left for Pomeroy to do their monthly marketing. When they returned, Kenny Rizer, Sr. insisted they go target shooting. They had had a number of heated discussions about family matters that day, and both had spoken to her brother in Springfield on the telephone in a friendly conversation about gardening and the weather.

One of Rizer’s sons called for him, but he was asleep in his chair, and Paula Rizer asked him to call back.

Rizer said she was working on a remodeling project in a bedroom when her husband called from the living room and told her they were going to practice target shooting. She said in taped interviews played for jurors earlier in the trial she was uncomfortable with handguns, although she had fired rifles and muzzleloaders for sport.

“Either go out with me or we will finish what we started this morning,” Rizer said her husband told her, “so I chose practice.”

Rizer said her husband told her to bring the 9 mm semi-automatic pistol, so he could show her how it operated. She said she got the gun from a bedroom, and brought it into the living room, holding it by the butt. When she walked into the kitchen to set down her cigarette, she said, she heard a click.

Rizer said she sat on the sofa in front of him, and he handed her the pistol.When she insisted he get out of his chair to help her, he became angry, she said Friday, lunged out of his chair, grabbed the gun and began hitting her in the back of the head while she was on the floor in front of him.

At that point in her testimony, Rizer began to sob, and became ill. The trial was recessed until 8:30 a.m. Monday.

Scene ‘reconstruction’

Turvey said his job in reconstructing a crime scene can only be completed after all evidence is collected and analyzed. Turvey accused crime scene processors of destroying important evidence, including the chair in which Rizer’s body was discovered, and failing to perform simple forensic tests at the scene.

That, he said, limited his ability to tell what happened at the Rizer home on April 3.

In his testimony preceding Rizer’s, Turvey said he had not examined the crime scene itself, but based his findings on discovery evidence provided during trial preparation. Defense Counsel Herman Carson and Glenn Jones provided reports from law enforcement investigations, photos from the crime scene and autopsy of Rizer’s body and an autopsy report from forensic pathologist Russell Uptegrove of the Montgomery County Coroner’s office.

Turvey said he later received x-ray pictures of the bullets in Rizer’s body, and photos of a pillow and a bullet recovered from it days after the shooting.

The pillow was in the recliner in which Rizer’s body was discovered, but had been moved.

Turvey asserted that the BCI’s forensic investigation was “low quality,” and that his conclusions were limited because of a lack of evidence and information that could have been gathered in the hours after the shooting. He said he was unable, for example, to determine a specific trajectory of the bullets fired, the sequence of the shots, and their path.

He said lasers, trajectory rods and even string can be “easily” used to make those determinations.

“I have seen it done thousands of times,” Turvey said.

The agent processing the crime scene said last week trajectory rods were ineffective in this case, because the chair’s construction made it unstable, and the trajectory test unreliable. Turvey told the jury of 11 women and one man any material a bullet penetrates can support such a forensic test.

Turvey also criticized the BCI investigators for their decision not to test blood spatter. Turvey said there was sufficient blood spatter evidence to make determinations about the shooting, including the direction in relation to the victim from which the shots were fired.

Turvey said his evaluation of the evidence presented to him indicate that the shots fired at Kenny Rizer, Sr. came from below him, an indication that an altercation like that the defendant described Friday had taken place. He based that determination, he said, on the locations of the bullet wounds and blood spatter photgraphs.

Turvey also noted that a piece of Rizer’s eyeglasses had been found on his person, but that the glasses themselves had not been located, and faulted investigators at the scene for their decision against preserving Rizer’s reclining chair, which he said would have produced important evidence not available now.

The pillow Rizer said her husband kept in his chair to make it more comfortable for him should also have been preserved as evidence, Turvey said, because it had evidentiary value.

“It was found under the body and contained evidence,” Turvey told jurors. “You have to collect it and explain the blood on it. It was a huge oversight.”

The pillow was destroyed during the execution of a second search warrant in the days following the shooting, in the process of removing the fifth bullet the defendant fired that day. Turvey said the bullet could have been removed while preserving other evidence the pillow could have provided.

“The shooter was in different locations at different times,” Turvey concluded.