There are no fingerprints and no bullets or spent casings that specifically link Bryce Gully to the shooting death of Matthew Huffman.
Gully's trial for first-degree murder and first-degree robbery continued Wednesday in Webster County District Court.
Richard Crivello, a criminologist with the Department of Criminal Investigation, said no fingerprints he lifted from Anna Sankey's car matched Gully's, who was 15 at the time of the shooting.
Crivello went to Trinity Regional Medical Center to collect evidence - mainly fingerprints - from Sankey's car around 6 a.m. the morning of the shooting, he said. Sankey drove Huffman and Dustin Akin to the Pleasant Valley neighborhood to buy drugs, according to Monday's testimony. Huffman was a passenger in Sankey's car when he was fatally shot early in the morning of Sept. 20, 2008.
Of the 23 fingerprint details found on the outside of the car, 16 prints could be completely developed. One print matched Sankey and 12 matched Akin. The three remaining could not be identified and were checked against Gully's prints.
Crivello said he could not eliminate or identify any individual with fingerprints from the .380 caliber bullets seized from Darnell Wheat's house where Gully was found hiding behind a mattress the morning of the shooting. A match with Gully's prints was not found on a casing retrieved from the crime scene.
While he could tell the casing had been handled, Crivello said "there was not enough to test."
Victor Murillo, a criminologist for the DCI crime lab's firearms section, could not match the bullet recovered in Huffman's body to a specific gun.
However, he said there were consistencies between the two live bullets recovered at Wheat's house and the spent cartridge from the crime scene for a .380 semi-automatic handgun.
Larry Hedlund, other DCI agents and law enforcement officials testified about the investigation in the days following the shooting and Gully's arrest on Sept. 22, 2008.
Dr. Pierce Eckhoff, an emergency room doctor at Trinity Regional Medical Center, said that although CPR and other resuscitation efforts were performed on Huffman when he was brought in, he was unresponsive and remained so. Eckhoff, and later Dr. Dennis Klein, the deputy state medical examiner, both said Huffman's body showed two entrance wounds and one exit wound that were likely made by one bullet. It appeared the bullet entered and passed through Huffman's right elbow then entered the right side of his torso. Huffman was pronounced dead at 1:51 a.m.
Gully's 13-year-old brother Malik Veal refused to answer questions from Webster County Assistant Attorney Ricki Osborn about a phone call with Gully regarding guns. At least twice during questioning, Judge Allen Goode had to tell Veal to answer the questions. After Veal was given a copy of a transcribed phone call and allowed to listen to the recorded call, he said he and his brother had a conversation about a BB gun.
However, Osborn said there was never a mention of BBs in the conversation, but instead, shells. During the phone call, Gully told his younger brother to "leave that stuff alone ... you don't even need one."
Testimony will continue at 9 a.m. this morning.
Contact Angela Burch at (515) 573-2141 or aburch@messengernews.net
