Latest: Cops testify at Samuel trial

The murder trial for Eldon Gale Samuel III, the Coeur d’Alene teenager accused of killing his father and younger brother in March 2014, continued Thursday morning with testimony from police detectives who searched the crime scene and collected weapons, ammunition and spent cartridges from inside the emergency housing unit where the family had been living. The weapons included a 9 mm semiautomatic pistol with magazine, a .45-caliber handgun with magazine, a shotgun, a machete with serrated top edge, a hatchet and several knives. All were introduced into evidence.

Coeur d’Alene Police Detective Nick Lowry described a couple of ledgers investigators found in the bedroom where Samuel slept. One was labeled “Zombie Survival Handbook,” and inside someone wrote that it “contains all the information you need to survive a zombie outbreak.” Other writings found in the room included a passage stating that the author believed “we should be allowed to keep our cell phones” at all times “for when the school is under attack.” A school writing assignment asked what items one would pack for an extended absence. The writer wrote that if a knock came on the door and he had only 20 minutes to pack and leave, he’d take “all of my guns” as well as food and ammunition to be prepared. Samuel was an eighth-grader at Lakes Magnet Middle School in 2012-13, but he frequently was absent from school, according to court documents.

Mellisa Estrada, the outreach director for St. Vincent de Paul North Idaho, testified that she secured the “small and old” Daly House on N. First Street for Eldon Samuel Jr. and his two sons to stay in for a 90-day stay. Estrada said that during their stay she never saw weapons in the house during occasional inspections of the property. If she had, the family would have been evicted for violating the rules, Estrada said. Tenants are given a 24-hour notice before an inspection. The Daly House, which since has been torn down, sat between the agency’s men’s shelter to the north and the women’s and children’s shelter to the south.

Estrada said she was on site that evening to deal with a dispute between two women, and afterward she heard a loud noise around 7:30 p.m. “It sounded like a gunshot or a backfire from a car,” Estrada said. She also testified that shelter managers had provided Samuel’s father with several cans of Scrubbing Bubbles cleaner at his request. Public Defender John Adams, in his opening statement Wednesday, said the elder Samuel had been huffing, or inhaling the cleaning product fumes, to get high.

Before the lunch break Thursday jurors watched a short police body camera video of the defendant, his hands cuffed behind his back, being photographed outside the house by Coeur d’Alene Police Office Cody Cohen before he was placed in a patrol car and taken to the police department for questioning.

Scott Maben/SR