HYDE PARK — Prosecutors and defense attorneys offered competing narratives of the 2022 killing of Fern Feather, a Hinesburg transgender woman, as the trial of suspect Seth Brunell began Tuesday.
Brunell, 46, has been charged with second-degree murder in the stabbing death of Feather in Morristown three years ago. If convicted, he could face up to life in prison.
In an opening statement, Sophie Stratton, an assistant attorney general, urged jurors to apply their “good judgment” and “common sense” to the facts of the alleged murder and ask if Feather’s death was warranted.
“The questions that you have to answer: How did this happen? Why did it happen? And was it justified?” Stratton said.
But Jessica Burke, the attorney defending Brunell, told the jury that the killing was an act of self-defense. The “rational conclusion” is that Feather attacked Brunell with a pair of scissors, and he stabbed Feather to protect himself, Burke said in her opening statement.
“SELF-DEFENSE ≠ MURDER,” Burke wrote on a large sheet of paper before the jury.
On Tuesday, prosecutors called multiple witnesses and presented evidence that provided more details about the incident on the morning of April 12, 2022, that left Feather dead.
According to testimony from law enforcement witnesses, Brunell had told police he had checked himself into a Berlin hospital several days prior for mental health concerns. After leaving the hospital, he was walking toward I-89 when Feather picked him up along the side of the road.
The two spent several days together, during which Feather and Brunell became close, according to Feather.
“Seth isn’t gay. He’s just a new awesome friend, life partner,” Feather told a friend, Eliza Curtis, in a text message the morning of their death, according to a text exchange between her and Feather that prosecutors presented in court.
But just hours later, around 10 a.m., Morristown resident Karen Cleary was driving down Duhamel Road when she spotted Feather’s lifeless body on the ground, with Brunell speaking on a phone nearby, according to her testimony Tuesday. Cleary stopped and, not long after a brief exchange with Brunell, called 911, she told the court.
According to Lance Lamb, a Morristown patrol officer who responded to the 911 call, Brunell told him that Feather had repeatedly sexually propositioned him while the two were spending time together. Lamb said that Brunell told him he’d turned down Feather’s advances.
But on the morning of the killing, while the two were in Feather’s car, Feather’s sexual propositions became more and more frequent, according to Lamb’s recollection of Brunell’s account.
When Feather, who was in the driver’s seat, crossed over the center of the car toward Brunell, who was in the passenger seat, Brunell “grabbed the knife and he pushed it into Fern’s chest at that point,” Lamb said, relating the story Brunell told him. “He continued pushing on the knife as he pushed Fern out of the driver’s side of the car onto the roadway.”
Lamb’s body camera footage, presented to the court, showed Feather’s body lying face up on the ground next to their car, surrounded by blood. Two dogs were also wandering in the road.
Burke, the defense attorney, used her opening statement and cross-examinations to question law enforcement’s handling of the case. Police had been too hasty with their investigation, she said, saying that Brunell had been criminally charged just hours after his arrest. What’s more, she said, law enforcement had allowed the “egregious” contamination of the crime scene.
She questioned multiple aspects of police officers’ procedures: why they had let dogs roam loose across the crime scene, why they had declined to test a substance found on the blade of a pair of scissors in Feather’s car, how they interpreted markings — that officers said were potential signs of a struggle — on the dirt road.
“The evidence will show that law enforcement rushed this case,” Burke said in her opening statement. “They didn’t slow down and assess the evidence. I submit that, if they had, they would have found that Seth acted in self-defense.”
The trial is expected to continue through this week and into early next week.
Correction: A prior version of this story misrepresented testimony about Brunell’s hospitalization.
Editor’s note: A paragraph in this story has been removed in line with VTDigger’s style guidelines.
