A Lululemon Athletica employee was alive when she suffered the hundreds of stab wounds, cuts and bruises found on her dead body, a medical examiner testified.
Dr. Mary Ripple, the deputy chief medical examiner for Maryland, testified Wednesday at Brittany Norwood’s first-degree murder trial that 30-year-old Jayna Murray suffered at least 331 injuries.
Norwood, 29, is accused of beating Murray to death at the Bethesda yoga store, where they worked together. Her trial is now in its second week in Montgomery County Circuit Court.
Murray’s bruises and blood in the wound tracts indicate she was still living when the blows were inflicted, Ripple said.
“I believe she was alive for all of them,” the medical examiner testified. Ripple said Murray likely died within a minute of one of the final wounds, a stab wound at the base of her head at the cut into her brain.
There is a gaping entry point for that wound, a photograph displayed to the jury in court shows. The knife used in the stabbing chipped part of a neck bone, went through her skull and into her brain, Ripple testified.
Over more than two hours of testimony, Ripple described Murray’s other injuries. The jury also saw gruesome photographs from the autopsy, showing Murray’s face, hands and neck covered in blood and bruises.
One photograph showed the top side of Murray’s bloodied head, behind her left ear. Repeated blunt objects hitting her head there, Ripple testified, “scraped her scalp off the bone.”
She suffered several skull fractures in that area and bruising to her brain. That bruising of the internal brain matter “required a lot of force,” said Ripple, who likened the trauma to internal brain injuries seen in car crash victims.
The back of Murray’s left hand is entirely bruised in one photograph; another shows an abrasion a rope left around her neck.
Ripple testified that Murray’s wounds are consistent with multiple items found at the store that prosecutors believe were used as weapons. Those include a rope, merchandise peg, knife, wrench, hammer and box cutters.
