MACHIAS – The murder trial of the 20-year-old Jonesboro woman accused of shooting her live-in boyfriend and leaving him to die was recessed Tuesday when authorities closed the Machias courthouse.

Sgt. Dennis Appleton of the Maine State Police Criminal Investigation Division was on the stand at 11:15 a.m. when Superior Court Clerk Marilyn Braley entered the courtroom and handed Justice Ellen Gorman the message saying the courthouse was being evacuated.

Gorman told the jury of the attacks on New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon and said the trial would be recessed until 8:30 a.m. Wednesday.

The evacuation cut short the second day of Katrina Bridges’ trial for the murder of 24-year-old Christopher Ingraham. Ingraham, the father of Bridges’ 4-month-old son, was shot in the back of the head in the early morning hours of Jan. 3.

He died at Eastern Maine Medical Center at approximately 2:30 a.m. Jan. 4 – 13 hours after police found him unconscious in the bedroom of the couple’s Look’s Point Road home.

Officers went to the home after Bridges reported the couple had been the victims of a home invasion. She initially told police that one of the two Canadians who forced their way into the home had abducted her and the baby and drove them around for hours, before letting them out of the vehicle near her mother’s home on the Marshfield Flats Road in Whitneyville.

Under police questioning, Bridges admitted to shooting Ingraham, but said she’d done it because he was suicidal and asked her to help him shoot himself in the back of the head with a small pistol. She said she had then driven around for hours, according to Maine State Police.

Tuesday’s testimony included that of Maine Chief Medical Examiner Margaret Greenwald, who told jurors she conducted the autopsy on Ingraham’s body and that the cause of his death was a gunshot wound to the head.

Greenwald said she concluded that the bullet had been fired “from a distance” because the area of the wound didn’t have any soot (powder burns) or the small abrasions that normally mark the skin of someone who has been shot at close range. Toxicology screening indicated no drugs or alcohol in Ingraham’s blood, Greenwald said.

Two guns were introduced into evidence Tuesday. One was a Sears rifle that officers found in an upstairs closet when they executed a search warrant at the couple’s home Jan. 4.

Prosecutor Andrew Benson told jurors during Monday’s opening arguments that Bridges stole the Sears rifle and the murder weapon when she burglarized a friend’s home the day before she shot Ingraham.

Appleton told jurors he had removed the second gun – a Browning .12-gauge shotgun – from the back of Bridges’ Nissan Pathfinder on the afternoon of Jan. 3. State police found the vehicle in a woodlot a short distance from Bridges’ mother’s home on the Marshfield Flats Road in Whitneyville.

Appleton said there were two rounds of ammunition in the gun, including a shell in the chamber.

He did not say who owned the gun. According to what Benson told jurors Monday, the murder weapon was a Remington Model 66 .22-caliber rifle that two Cherryfield men found at the Fox Pond boat landing on Route 182 on Jan. 5.

Jeffrey Toothaker, one of Bridges’ lawyers, cross-examined Appleton and Detective David Socoby, asking why the Jan. 4 warrant search of the couple’s home didn’t include fingerprinting and other techniques that traditionally are used at crime scenes.

Appleton said the police did not take fingerprints because of the admissions they had from Bridges and because there had been so many people, including emergency medical personnel, in the house the previous day.

Toothaker and David Mitchell maintain state police detectives forced a confession from Bridges after hours of questioning and then tailored their investigation to support that confession.