O’Leary will testify Thursday

Head UCF football coach Geoge O'Leary is scheduled to testify Thursday morning in the Ereck Plancher wrongful death trial against the UCF Athletics Association (UCFAA).

O'Leary was supposed to testify Wednesday but was rescheduled because he had another engagement and the Plancher family attorneys told Judge Robert Evans they weren't ready to question him.

Evans, who reprimanded both parties of attorneys Tuesday morning for spending more than an hour arguing over what depositions could be used and sorting through the UCF attorney's objections, was again frustrated with both parties for, in his opinion, wasting time.

"You're using up a lot of time on things that may seem important at the time...consider what you're arguing about carefully," Evans said. "I'm dangerously close to ordering you to have dinner together [to resolve conflicts]."

On Tuesday, Evans threatened to file sanctions against both parties.

"Why am I doing this during trial time?" Evans asked. "In 17 years as a judge, I've never had this happen."

"This is garbage," said Dan Shapiro, one of the UCFAA attorneys.

After the conflicts were resolved, medical examiner Joshua Stephany was called to the witness stand to finish his testimony that took up most of Tuesday.

Plancher family attorney Steve Yerrid spent about four hours questioning Stephany about his experience, sickle cell trait and Plancher's autopsy.

When Yerrid asked him to explain exactly how an autopsy works, Plancher attorney J.D. Dowell escorted Plancher's mother, Gisele Plancher, out of the courtroom. She did not return to the courtroom for the remainder of that day.

Stephany told the court yesterday, and during his testimony on Tuesday, that Plancher's cause of death was dysrhythmia due to acute exertional rhabdomyolysis with sickle cell trait.

During the cross-examination of Stephany, UCFAA attorneys questioned him about the prominence of cardiac issues in exercise-related sudden deaths in young adults. UCFAA attorneys have argued that Plancher suffered from an alleged undiagnosed heart condition.

Stephany agreed that more than 50 percent of those deaths are cardiac-related, which is why he decided to save the heart for further examination when the autopsy was being performed.

Stephany told the jury Tuesday and Wednesday that Plancher's death was caused by sickle cell trait complications.

He said sickle cell trait is a genetic disorder that, when the body is under intense duress, can lead to organ breakdown if there is excessive sickling of the red blood cells.

He described what he saw in Plancher's autopsy as a "logjam of blood."

During the testimony on Tuesday, Shapiro objected when Stephany said he'd never seen sickling like what he saw in Plancher because he didn't think it was fair to compare cases. Evans told him to deal with that in the cross-examination.

Also called as a witness yesterday was Andrew Swenson of Andy Swenson Consulting, LLC.

Swenson, who has a degree in computer science, was sought out by the Plancher family attorneys in January of last year because of his experience with computer operating systems and computer forensics.

Swenson examined a copy of Plancher's original computer hard drive to search through documents, pictures, browser history and caches for keywords including: sickle, sickle cell, anemia, sickle cell anemia, sickle trait and coach O'Leary.

He did not find any of that in his first examination or the second examination when an expert brought in by UCFAA attorneys assisted in the examination.

When Swenson was cross-examined, UCFAA attorneys brought up that searches on UCF's computers had not been performed and that it was possible Plancher had a different computer before he had the one that was examined by Swenson.