A Baltimore County man is on trial this week, accused of stabbing his teenage stepdaughter to death in her bedroom and setting their Essex house on fire with his infant daughter in another room in 2005.
In opening statements, prosecutors said Carl Evans, 36, was last seen running down an alley and toward a wooded area near his burning home in the 900 block of Foxridge Lane, just as fire trucks arrived. He left behind a laptop computer bag and a Jansport knapsack on the front lawn, containing a pair of knives with 13-year-old Breaunna Floyd?s blood, prosecutor Michael Fuller said.
Breaunna?s bedroom was so dense with smoke that firefighters didn?t realize until they carried her outside and she slipped out of their arms onto a porch that she was dead, her body slick with blood, Fuller said.
Prosecutors offer no motive to explain why Evans would kill his wife?s daughter, defense attorney Gary Schenker said in his opening statement. Police only pursued Evans as the suspect, he said, and did not pursue a witness? claim that another young man ran out a back door of the house around the time of the fire.
“We?re not challenging what happened,” he said. “The challenge in this case is, who did it?”
Investigators also found male DNA at the crime scene that did not match Evans?, he said.
Testifying for the state, Kenya Evans, Breaunna?s mother, said she left her two daughters at home before 6 a.m. on July 25, 2005, dropped her husband off at Franklin Square Hospital for treatment for an eye infection and went to work at the Baltimore City Detention Center, where she was a correctional officer. A supervisor approached her near the end of her shift and told her to go to the police, she said.
Evans told authorities in a videotaped interview that he went home after he was treated, Fuller said, and found Breaunna on the phone with a friend. When asked what happened after that, Fuller said Evans told them, “I don?t know, I don?t know, I don?t know.”
Evans faces murder, attempted murder and arson charges. The trial is expected to last a week.
