A “possible tooth fragment” found on property belonging to murder defendant Patrick Frazee will be tested for DNA, 4th Judicial District Prosecutor Jennifer Viehman said according to CBS Denver. The state and defense debated over the terms of this testing in a hearing Friday.
DNA specialist Caitlin Rogers, of the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, testified about the procedure. She said that usually, they split the evidence in half to save it, but that’s not possible if the sample is too small.
Rogers says usually they do a sample split, split evidence in half to preserve it. Sometimes evidence is too small so they can’t do that. She’s explaining how they usually test evidence this small. Still don’t know what this evidence is. @KKTV11News #PatrickFrazee #KelseyBerreth
— Ashley Franco (@AshleyKKTV) June 14, 2019
Defense was given two weeks to get an expert and then the CBI will set up a time to test it. @KKTV11News #KesleyBerreth #PatrickFrazee
— Ashley Franco (@AshleyKKTV) June 14, 2019
This is going to be a consumptive test, and it would be destroyed.
Frazee is fighting allegations is that he murdered Kelsey Berreth, the fiancée and mother of their one-year-old daughter. That “possible tooth fragment” evokes a detail from the arrest affidavit.
The defendant allegedly tricked the victim into putting someone on her eyes so she could guess the scenes of various candles. He used this moment to hit her with a baseball bat, authorities said. Ex-girlfriend and key witness Krystal Lee said she didn’t see the incident, but added that Frazee worried about leaving a tooth behind at the scene because when he hit Berreth, it dislodged several of the teeth. Lee said she found that a tooth and got rid of it, according to the affidavit.
The trial is set to begin October 28. Berreth remains missing, and is presumed dead.
[Screengrab via Fox 31 Denver]
