A state medical examiner who conducted the autopsy of Margarita Fisenko Scott touched both sides of her neck in court Tuesday to show jurors the path of the fatal bullet.
Dr. Margaret Greenwald, who was the state’s chief medical examiner before retiring in June, said the bullet went into the left front of Scott’s throat, severed her spinal cord and went out the right rear of her neck. Scott’s heart would have stopped moments later, Greenwald concluded.
Greenwald testified during the second day of the murder trial of Anthony Pratt Jr., who is accused of fatally shooting the 29-year-old Westbrook woman in Portland on Nov. 11, 2012, two months before her body was found.
A prosecutor asked Greenwald how long Scott had been dead before her frozen and partially decomposed body was found on Jan. 17, 2013, in the back seat of a vehicle in the parking lot of the Motel 6 on Riverside Street.
“I couldn’t tell exactly how long,” Greenwald said. “It looked like she had been dead for some time; my estimate was weeks to months.”
Prosecutors in the trial at the Cumberland County Courthouse in Portland say Pratt, 21, of Queens, New York, shot Scott, a married woman with whom he became romantically involved, in an apartment on West Concord Street in Portland, where Pratt and Scott were living temporarily with friends.
Police allege that Pratt loaded Scott’s body in the back of her Chevrolet Trailblazer and drove the SUV to the motel, where it remained unnoticed until her friend Brian Malloy and her husband, Cary Scott, found the vehicle and her body.
Greenwald testified that the autopsy she did at the state laboratory in Augusta on Jan. 18, 2013, was made more difficult because Scott’s body had been frozen, then thawed, and decomposition had begun.
Another witness, Daniel Dumont, who lived in an apartment below Scott and her husband at 78 Central St. in Westbrook, testified that on the day before Scott was killed he saw Pratt outside, beating and kicking Scott so severely that Dumont called 911.
Dumont identified Pratt to jurors as the man he saw around 10:15 a.m. on Nov. 10, 2012, yelling at Scott for returning to her husband and attacking her after they came down the stairs from the Scotts’ second-floor apartment.
“She didn’t have the chance to fight back,” Dumont said.
Rebecca Towne, a Westbrook police officer who responded to the 911 call, testified that when she got to the apartment, Scott’s attacker was gone and Scott was reluctant to talk about what had happened.
“She was upset. She was crying,” said Towne, who photographed her injuries.
Jurors saw the photos of Scott’s swollen right cheek, swollen right ear and bruised right hand. In those pictures, Scott was shown wearing the same pajama pants that were found on her body.
A Portland police detective, Maryann Bailey, testified that police concluded that Scott was killed sometime between 1 and 3 a.m. on Nov. 11, 2012.
Bailey said she reviewed police logs to find times police had been called to the Motel 6 for other reasons and determined which officers and cruisers had gone to the motel. She then accessed cruiser camera videos to pinpoint when the Chevrolet Trailblazer first appeared in the parking lot.
Police were called to the hotel, or went on their own, with video cameras activated at 2:28 a.m. and 6:42 p.m. on Nov. 11, and several times thereafter.
Bailey testified that in the 2:28 a.m. video it is unclear whether the Trailblazer is in the parking lot, but the video from that evening clearly shows the vehicle.
On Wednesday, prosecutors plan to call Christopher and Tunile Jennings, who rented the apartment where police say Scott was killed and who provided some of the most damning evidence against Pratt.
Pratt’s attorneys have argued that the Jenningses’ DNA, but not Pratt’s, was found on the .40-caliber pistol that was used to kill Scott, and have said Christopher Jennings was the last person to have sex with Scott before she was killed.
Tunile Jennings has admitted that she threatened to kill Scott on the evening of Nov. 10, 2012, if she found out that Scott was having sex with her husband.
Neither Christopher nor Tunile Jennings has been charged in connection with Scott’s death.
Pratt has pleaded not guilty to a single count of murder and has been held without bail since his arrest in New York in April 2013.
Scott Dolan can be contacted at 791-6304 or at:
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