AUBURN - Inmates were watching a boxing match on television in Auburn Correctional Facility's south yard when Shane Hotmer's head smashed to the asphalt.

It's special prosecutor John Tunney's theory that it was fellow inmate Virgil Owens who took a hard object, perhaps a hard compact lock, to Hotmer's head amid the crowd of maximum-security state prisoners around 10 p.m. Sept. 6, 2003. Hotmer's body stiffened before falling backward, causing a noise so loud that witnesses still recall the sound, Tunney said in opening arguments Wednesday.

Owens' trial on charges related to Hotmer's death Sept. 7, 2003, opened Wednesday after a jury was selected Monday.

The assailant had come from behind to strike Hotmer in the head, before he “melted into the crowd and dispersed with others,” said Tunney, the Steuben

County District Attorney who is handling the prosecution because members of Cayuga County District Attorney James Vargason's staff have connections to potential witnesses in the case.

Inmates who witnessed the assault saw “Miami” (as Owens was known at ACF) walk up to Hotmer and strike him in the back of the head; they saw him take off his sweatshirt as a simplistic means of changing his appearance, Tunney said.

Wearing an oak brown sweatshirt and blue jeans instead of a prison jumpsuit, Owens had exercised the prisoner's right to wear civilian clothes during a jury trial. He faces the felony charges of first-degree manslaughter, first-degree assault and second-degree assault.

Owens' assigned counsel, Michael Bass, argued that there is no evidence that Owens ever met Hotmer.

Inmates didn't start to come forward to finger Owens until an investigation of Hotmer's death began by New York State Police and employees of the state Office of the Inspector General, Bass said.

The prisoners' motive?

Bass said it was to get a better situation for themselves.

The inmates were “flying by the seat of their pants to tell police what they wanted to hear to get a deal,” Bass said.

He asked the nine-woman and three-man jury to rule out the forthcoming testimony from inmates not because of their criminal convictions and subsequent incarceration, but because of inconsistencies in their testimony that he predicted will emerge.

Owens, currently held in Seneca County's Five Points Correctional Facility, is serving a 100-years-to-life sentence for an Erie County murder, robbery and assault.

Medical officials who treated Hotmer and Dr. Scott LaPoint, a pathologist with the Monroe County Medical Examiner's Office who did the autopsy, testified that Hotmer sustained a massive collection of blood and skull fractures on the back of his head as well as internal bruises to the cerebellum part of his brain. They also testified he had a black and blue mark around the orbital cupping his left eye.

LaPoint testified that he believed the bruising around Hotmer's eye was the result of a contra-coup injury, where the blow at the back of his head caused Hotmer's brain to “bounce” and damage the front part of his brain and the surrounding tissues.

With the skull fracture, Hotmer's brain began to bleed and swell until his brain pushed down into his spinal cord and shut off vital functions like breathing.

After Hotmer first fell, he was carried by inmates in a handmade stretcher to the nurse's station. From there a Rural/Metro ambulance was called to take Hotmer to Auburn Memorial Hospital. As the severity of his head trauma became clear, Hotmer was intubated with a breathing tube and transferred to Syracuse's SUNY Upstate Medical University.

The morning after the blow to his head was sustained, life support alone was keeping Hotmer alive. His mother gave permission over the telephone for doctors to shut off his life support.

A little more than 12 hours after his head struck the ground, Hotmer was dead.

Staff writer Amaris Elliott-Engel can be reached at 253-5311 ext. 282 or at amaris.elliot-engel@lee.net