POMEROY — Prosecuting Attorney Colleen Williams has begun to subpoena witnesses for the Jan. 7 retrial of Paula Rizer, on a charge of murder.

Rizer remains in sheriff’s custody at the Washington County Jail, after a jury of 11 women and a man acquitted her earlier this month of aggravated murder and deadlocked on the lesser charge of murder. Her new trial was set after Judge Fred W. Crow III determined the jury could not reach a unanimous verdict on the lesser charge.

Rizer is accused of shooting her husband, Kenneth Rizer, Sr., multiple times at their Lebanon Township home on April 3. At her trial last month, Rizer claimed she and her husband were in the midst of an argument and a physical struggle when the semi-automatic handgun he was teaching her to use fired five shots and killed him.

Williams has asked Clerk of Courts Diane Lynch to issue subpoenas to 13 potential witnesses for the prosection. Most of those witnesses have already testified in the case. Witnesses include Russell Uptegrove, a forensic pathologist with the Montgomery County Coroner’s office, who performed the autopsy on Rizer’s body the day after his death, Sheriff Robert Beegle, and his deputies, Adam Smith, Rick Smith, Jonathan Sanders and Scott Trussell, who was the first deputy on the scene of the shooting, and who interviewed Rizer in the hours after her husband’s death.

Williams has also requested subpoenas be issued to Coroner Douglas Hunter and his investigator, Larry Marshall, Sheriff’s dispatcher Twila Childs, and representatives of Home National Bank and State Farm Insurance, which holds an unpaid life insurance policy on Kenneth Rizer, Sr.

A final witness, Brian Hunt of Lovett Road, was not called to testify in Rizer’s first trial, but has been named as a potential state’s witnesses in the January retrial.

Rizer is represented by Herman Carson and Glenn Jones of the Ohio Public Defender’s Athens office. She testified for two days in her first trial, claiming the shots were fired accidentally, and that she was unable to stop the shots once they were fired.