Nobody disputes that the brutal shooting deaths of Brittany Mack, Travis Sneed and Kristina Soles on July 4, 2021, at Lundy's Trailer Park outside Statesboro were homicide. But at issue in Rolando "Chico" Millan's murder trial that began Monday is whether he did the killings.

The jury had been selected 11 days earlier, so the first day of the trial in Bulloch County Superior Court progressed rapidly from Judge F. Gates Peed's routine definitions and instructions to the jurors at 9 a.m. through opening statements by the attorneys and testimony from the first eight witnesses. 

The mobile home at Lot 9 where the shootings occurred was the home of Brittany Sneed Mack, 35, who lived there with her 3-year-old son. Mack's brother, Travis Sneed, 37, was staying there with her at time, and had his 5-year-old daughter with him that weekend. Sneed's girlfriend, Kristina Soles, 37, was there that day with her 7-year-old daughter, who had been dropped off by her grandmother.

"Three people died that day, and three kids each lost a parent," Assistant District Attorney Jillian Gibson said in her opening statement for the prosecution.

Investigators didn't publicly identify Millan, who was 16 at the time of the shootings, as the suspect until almost two months after the shooting. By then he was being held in the Youth Detention Center at Augusta on an unrelated charge.

In addition to three counts each of malice murder and felony murder, three counts of aggravated assault and one of possessing a firearm while committing a felony, Millan was charged in a March 2022 Bulloch County grand jury indictment with three counts of first-degree cruelty to children for allegedly shooting the adults in the presence of the children. He pleaded not-guilty to all counts.

Monday's witnesses and evidence included the Bulloch County Sheriff's Office deputy first on the scene and a shift sergeant with video from their body-worn cameras, crime scene photos taken by the now-retired GBI crime scene specialist who testified as an expert witness on blood pattern analysis, pictures from the autopsies explained by the forensic expert who performed them, and a GBI firearms specialist's analysis of the eight 9mm Glock-consistent shell casings and multiple bullet fragments recovered.

Dr. Joni Skipper, the medical examiner and forensic pathologist, reported that gunshot wounds were the cause and homicide the manner of all three deaths. Mack had five, Sneed six and Soles three gunshot wounds, about which Skipper testified in detail.

'Pieces of the puzzle'

None of Monday's witnesses were eyewitnesses to the crime. Nor have prosecutors or investigators indicated that they have the actual gun used in the shootings. Gibson in her opening statement instead referred to a July 21, 2021, search of the home of Millan's grandmother on Simons Road, with her consent, in which a GBI agent found a white Nike shoe with blood on it in the room where Millan had been staying, blood Gibson predicted another expert will testify was Sneed's. She also said a picture of Millan holding a 9mm Glock pistol was found.

Those were not part of the testimony and evidence presented yet Monday. Gibson told jurors they won't learn all of the pieces to the puzzle "because there's only one person who knows all those pieces."

"But you're going to have enough pieces of this puzzle to see a clear picture of what happened," she said. "You're going to hear evidence of motive, because one of the victims, Travis, owed the defendant money. You're going to hear evidence of opportunity. He was there in the area. He was not in Morris Heights like he claimed to be. He was there long enough and shot and killed Travis Sneed, Brittany Mack and Kristina Soles. He had Travis' blood on his shoes."

No adult eyewitness

However, Millan's defense attorney, Nicole Fegan of Atlanta, told jurors that "in order for you to determine the facts, to determine the truth, you have to know everything."

The only eyewitnesses, she said, were the children. The 5-year-old had said that "Chino the human, not Chino the dog" had come to the home and there was a dog in the neighborhood with that name, and the 7-year-old had said a man she wasn't familiar with "gave Travis a gun, that Travis opened the gun, put something in the gun, closed the gun, and then the shooting occurred," Fegan asserted in her opening statement.

She said that during jury selection, jurors had heard a list of 118 potential witnesses.

"Ladies and gentlemen, of those 118 people, only three of them were there. Ladies and gentlemen, what will not happen in this case is no one will take the stand, point at my client and say they saw him be the shooter," Fegan said. "That will not happen."

Monday's first witness was Helen Sneed, mother of two of the victims and grandmother of two of the surviving children. She testified that she visited her daughter's mobile home late that afternoon and left about 6:20 p.m. after someone had knocked on the door and she was the one who got up to answer. That was about 50 minutes before a neighbor made a 911 call about the shootings.

But instead of someone standing at the door, Mrs. Sneed had found a young man sitting on a chair  on the porch. She had told investigators he had "curly hair," was "handsome" and looked to be "Puerto Rican." But she had first discussed two other men with investigators as of interest and been shown a picture of another young man, not Millan, as the one she had seen that day, she acknowledged in cross-examination by Fegan.

Peed sent the jury home about 5 p.m. Monday with instructions to return at 8:45 a.m. Tuesday. The trial is slated to last up to five days.