BRIDGEPORT -- Perhaps the third time is the charm for Alyssiah Wiley's family.
Jermaine Richards, 34, is accused of murdering Wiley, his girlfriend, after she broke up with him the day before she vanished in 2013, is standing trial for her murder for a third time. The previous two juries deadlocked.
Those taking the stand on day one included several women, who were friends of Wiley at Eastern Connecticut State University, which is where she was last seen publicly on April 20, 2013.
"A day we will never forget," said Tierra Downie, who is now a fifth grade teacher.
She says she felt like Jermaine Richards was controlling Alyssiah Wiley, especially, she says, during a February 2013 conference that Downie and Wiley attended off-campus.
"We were set to go out and she couldn't, when we got there. And then she said 'I can't go.'"
Another woman testified how Wiley would always have to tell Richards who she was with when they were speaking on the phone.
But, Richards' attorney, Walter Hussey, turned the tables on the women when he tried to establish that, because these women rarely ever socialized with Wiley away from campus, they couldn't possibly know what Wiley and Richards' relationship was truly like.
"While you were at Eastern, did you ever have any contact with Jermaine Richards," asked Hussey of Downie.
"No," she said.
"You never met him," Hussey asked.
"No," she replied.
"You never spoke with him," Hussey probed.
"No," said Downie.
Surveillance video shows Wiley getting into Richards' car outside of her dormitory at just after 12 p.m. on Saturday, April 20, 2013. She was never seen again.
Nearly four weeks later, her dismembered body was discovered in the woods at the end of Quarry Road in Trumbull. That location is less than two miles from where Richards lived.
Hussey also brought up Wiley's grandmother, because that's where the 20-year-old said she was headed after canceling out on attending an on-campus function.
It was never determined how Wiley was killed.
The mothers of both Wiley and Richards will once again testify.