Pennsylvania State Police must have believed Jordan Brown committed the perfect crime in 2009, his lawyer told a jury Tuesday.

In just two minutes, according to the scenario described by attorney Alec Wright that he attributed to state police, the then-11-year-old went upstairs in his Lawrence County home, retrieved his shotgun, returned downstairs and walked into the bedroom where Kenzie Houk, the woman he considered to be his stepmother, lay in bed.

Then, Wright continued, Brown opened an armoire in the room, removed a .20-gauge shotgun shell stored inside, loaded it into his youth-model weapon, racked the gun, walked around to the side of the bed where Houk — eight months pregnant — was resting, placed the muzzle of the gun behind her head and pulled the trigger.

And after all of that, state police believe Brown had the presence of mind to remove all the evidence, wipe down the shotgun, return it to the corner of his room, meet Houk’s 7-year-old daughter downstairs and then leave with her to go to school, according to Wright.

“The perfect crime,” Wright told the jury, “committed by a boy with food stains all over his clothing.”

Brown, now 26, was charged with criminal homicide on Feb. 21, 2009, just 16 hours after Houk was killed in her rented Wampum farmhouse.

He was adjudicated delinquent of first-degree murder and incarcerated until age 18.

But in July 2018, the state Supreme Court reversed his conviction, finding that the prosecution had failed to present sufficient evidence to sustain the charges.

Two years later, Brown sued the four Pennsylvania state troopers who led the investigation, alleging malicious prosecution and fabrication of evidence. They include retired troopers Janice Wilson, Jeffrey Martin, Troy Steinheiser and Robert McGraw, who has since died.

The civil trial against them began Wednesday before Judge W. Scott Hardy in U.S. District Court in Pittsburgh.

Brown alleges investigators withheld exculpatory information from the affidavit of probable cause used to charge him. He also claims troopers interviewed Houk’s daughter Jenessa four times until they got the information from her they were seeking.

“This was not a split-second decision,” Wright said. “This was a reckless disregard for Jordan’s constitutional rights.”

The troopers investigating Houk’s death that day rushed to judgment, Wright said, fabricating evidence and ignoring statements that pointed to the boy’s innocence.

“You’ll understand the cherry-picking and falsifying just to arrest an innocent 11-year-old,” he said. “It’s a travesty.”

‘Means, ability, opportunity’

During his 29-minute opening statement, Wright told the eight-person jury that the state police failed to thoroughly investigate the most likely suspect — Houk’s ex-boyfriend, who had been violent with her in the past, was the subject of a restraining order by her and her family and who recently had learned that he was not the father of Houk’s 4-year-old daughter.

But Nicole Boland, a state police attorney, told the jury during her opening that the ex-boyfriend was investigated.

State police turned to him after clearing Brown’s father, Chris Brown, who was at work at the time of the shooting.

“They tried to investigate. They took steps and brought him into the barracks,” Boland said about the ex-boyfriend. “There wasn’t enough probable cause to arrest (him.)”

But, she continued, the troopers did gather information about Jordan Brown, including the statements from Jenessa.

“Jordan Brown had the means, ability, opportunity. And because a witness saw him with a gun and heard him pull the trigger,” Boland said, the investigation turned toward him.

“Nothing in this case was fabricated,” she said. “The investigators did not miss or make up any information.”

Boland told the jury there was no evidence that needed to be cleaned up from the shotgun blast, and that when first responders arrived, they didn’t even realize Houk had been shot because her hair obscured the blood.

Instead, it wasn’t until the coroner arrived, Boland said, that the shotgun wound was revealed — although that statement is counter to reports that the initial troopers on scene became physically ill after attempting to resuscitate Houk.

Boland argued Jenessa’s statements to police established probable cause to charge Jordan Brown. Probable cause requires only that there is evidence sufficient to show a crime has been committed and that a particular person committed it.

“This case is about probable cause,” she said. “We’re not here to decide guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.”

A ‘big boom’

Following opening statements, the plaintiffs called two retired troopers to testify and played a video deposition of McGraw. Much of that examination revolved around how the interviews of Jenessa Houk and Jordan Brown were conducted.

The first witness called in the case was former state police Commissioner Frank Pawlowski.

Pawlowski, who spent much of his career in criminal investigations, was not part of the Houk case but talked about general practice in conducting interviews. He told the jury that he did not make a habit of recording every witness interview and that it was not required by the state police.

Pawlowski said troopers go into an initial interview thinking it could be their only chance.

“Do your best to get all the information you can at that first sitting if that’s possible,” he said.

But Jenessa Houk was interviewed four times in the 15 hours after her mother’s death — at 11:15 a.m., 8:40 p.m., 12 a.m. and 12:16 a.m.

Only the last one was recorded.

Pawlowski noted that in the third interview, Jenessa Houk provided more information than in earlier statements. In that one, for the first time, she recounted seeing Jordan with two guns that morning and said he told her his dad had asked him to move them.

Then, in the fourth interview, which lasted 3 minutes and 55 seconds, Jenessa Houk told the troopers she was in the laundry room waiting for Jordan so they could leave for school when she heard a “big boom.”

“‘I asked him what it was, and he didn’t say,’” she told investigators.

That information served as a large basis for the affidavit of probable cause that was used to charge Brown.

But Pawlowski said during his deposition in the case that he didn’t believe that recorded statement alone was enough to file charges against Brown.

“You look at all the other interviews and tie the information together as best you can,” he testified Wednesday. “You balance it against everything else that you have.”

Smell test

Brown’s attorneys also asked extensive questions of the witnesses about how troopers made the determination that Brown’s 20-gauge shotgun had been recently fired.

A trooper in the house that day said he smelled it.

But Pawlowski and McGraw, in his video deposition, said it was unusual to use smell to determine whether a gun was recently fired. Neither man could point to any training they’d received along those lines or any other cases they’d worked where that was a consideration.

“That’s nothing more than their opinion,” Pawlowski said. “I’m not sure how scientific that is.”

The trial is expected to continue for two weeks and will be split into two phases.

The first will be to determine liability. If the jurors believe the troopers are liable for their actions, the case will move into a damages phase.

Testimony is expected to resume Thursday morning.

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