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The trial went on for three and a half days. It seemed like there was more and more evidence for Lauren’s story at every turn. We didn’t know what he was putting in the drink; maybe it was harmless. Well, no, actually, because Fabrizio spilled the drink, there was some left on the clothes Cole died in, and when tested, it came back as Rohypnol, one of the top 3 date rape drugs found in the United States.
Well, maybe this was actually something they liked to do, a game they played? Knowing what I did about Lauren’s deeply held kinks, I couldn’t imagine that went over well with her. Still, she kept her cool—and brought Claire Brown to the stand.
“We were together three years,” Claire sniffed. “He was—he was great up until the last months. He started to change, hung out with different people and got obsessed with this stupid podcast he listened to about male supremacy and misogyny. Things got really bad really fast. He became demanding and jealous, really controlling, he told me what I could and couldn’t wear and what I could or couldn’t do. I didn’t want to believe that the Toby I knew could be like that, so I tried to bring him back. That night was actually the night I knew I had to leave.”
“And why is that?” Lauren asked. Claire gulped.
“He—the way he was touching me,” she said, voice shaky. She couldn’t seem to look at the room. “I don’t mind PDA, I like it actually, but that’s stuff like quick kisses and handholding. I’ve never wanted to actually get sexual in public, and he knew that. He’d expressed some interest before, at the beginning, but I told him it was a hard limit, and he never brought it up again.”
“Until that night,” Lauren said sympathetically. Clair laughed sadly.
“Until that night,” she agreed. “He didn’t even actually bring it up; he just did it. I told him to stop, but he wouldn’t, saying stuff like how it was my ‘duty’ to him to fulfill his needs, and he had the ‘biological right’ to put his desires on me. It was really nasty, disgusting stuff. He’d never said anything like that before, and he definitely hadn’t tried to touch me so aggressively. It made me realize that Toby was already gone, and I had to leave before it got worse.”
“And until this trial started, did you know he had drugged your drink?”
Claire choked up. “N-no,” she croaked out. Lauren gave her a second, handed her a tissue, and stepped back from the stand.
“No more questions, Your Honor.”
Of course, then it was the prosecution’s turn. They pulled all the usual bullshit, asking her why she followed him if she knew she had to leave, why she’d reach out to take the drink, why she didn’t fight him and storm off. It made a lot of people shift uncomfortably, and many in anger, even in the jury box, but Lauren had clearly prepared her witness well.
“Look at me,” she’d half-laughed, gesturing to herself. She was full-figured, on the short side, very cute but didn’t appear to be hiding any muscle. She wasn’t a threat. “You think I could have won in a fight? Or did you expect me to rely on help from strangers? I met the eyes of at least three other dancers while he was trying to—to assault me, begged them for help, and they all just turned away. Nobody would have done anything. It would be me and me alone, and he’d win, and then what would happen to me?”
The attorney tried to bring up the two and a half good years she’d had with Cole, and she’d just asked him why he thought she’d stayed so long. She was winning a lot of sympathy. She was making Fabrizio look like the knight in shining armor.
Then there was the whole thing with the car. It wasn’t even supposed to be there; the road was shut down, but Lauren had found the driver. It was a 48-year-old woman with a booze and drug habit who was caught three hours later going 80 in a 35 and who blew a .14 when she was pulled over—almost twice the legal limit and very close to the blackout point.
Lauren put her on the stand, and she admitted that she had hit someone but couldn’t remember where. She saw the road was clear and decided to floor it to the bottom. After the hit-and-run, she’d had the presence of mind to dump the car. The front of it was covered in blood, so she stole a different one from a parking lot and continued her spree. They found said car right where she’d said it would be, and the blood was a match for Cole’s.
She had been so drunk she couldn’t give many other specifics and couldn’t remember seeing Fabrizio or the fatal push, but at least that proved that she was driving so erratically that my brother couldn’t have possibly known she was going to hit the gas. The driver started crying, saying she was sorry, so sorry she’d killed him.
Well, that looked good for Fabri.
The prosecution pointed out that the driver being drunk didn’t change the fact that Fabrizio threw Cole into the road in the first place, but Lauren was able to show what speeds the car was going by analyzing the headlights in the video. Based on the size and brightness of the lights, it looked like the driver sped up just as my brother grabbed Cole’s shirt to push him and reached 70 miles per hour in those few seconds. Lauren argued it was so sudden that Fabrizio couldn’t have stopped his own motion in time, even if he had realized what was happening.
Then, we all saw the aftermath, where my brother frantically tried to keep the mangled Cole alive. It failed quickly, obviously, but the important part was that he tried.
“Does that look like the action of a killer to you?” Lauren asked the jury.
I didn’t have good dreams that night.
The last day was all character witnesses, people talking about how Fabrizio helped them in class or was always friendly to them. Some people talked about playing volleyball with him in freshman year, before he stopped playing and focused on his studies. His academic advisor gave him a glowing review, it was all very lovely. I couldn’t lie, it made me even more proud of my brother, even as anxiety was gnawing away at me. A bunch of people talked about Tobias Cole, too, his sudden attitude change and concerning behaviors, lending even more credence to the story.
Then Lauren called Fabrizio to the stand, and a pit formed in my stomach. Mom and Dad said he would be the final witness, so that meant the trial was almost over. It was becoming real now. There was still no sign of Declan Baron. My last chance of freeing my brother entirely was slipping through my fingers, and I couldn’t do anything about it.
It was setting in for me that Fabri was going to go to prison. He was going to get sentenced, and if Lauren was unsuccessful in convincing the jury to change his crime to manslaughter, then he’d be in there for 20 years. I felt sicker and sicker with each second that passed.
My brother started talking. “I was on my way home from the library and decided to drop into the bar to have a quick drink. I had heard people talk about it and figured I might bump into someone I knew there, so I ordered something and hung out for a while. That’s when I saw Tobias push Claire down.”
“In the video, you got up like you were going to go help her. What did you plan to do?” Lauren asked.
“I didn’t, really,” Fabrizio said with a self-deprecating chuckle. “I was just acting on instinct. I mean, a guy pushed my friend down pretty roughly, what was I going to do, look away?”
“So you didn’t intend to fight Mr. Cole?”
“No! I don’t know how to fight, I’d probably have gotten my ass kicked by a guy like Tobias. I just, I guess I just wanted to get between them, tell him to back off of her, you know?”
“Alright. And then what?”
