WILMINGTON, Del. - The murder trial of Wharton undergraduate Irina Malinovskaya has been postponed until at least Monday due to an emergency in Judge James Vaughn's family.
The cause of the emergency was not known, but Vaughn called a recess yesterday morning in the middle of the testimony of Sergey Dedov, Malinovskaya's boyfriend at the time of the death of Irina Zlotnikov, the then-girlfriend of Malinovskaya's ex-boyfriend, Robert Bondar.
Later that afternoon, another judge closed the day's session, saying that witness testimony would probably be begin again Monday.
Before the abrupt halting of the proceedings, the defense called a series of friends of Malinovskaya.
Roman Gorelik, who met Malinovskaya when the two were undergraduates at Penn, told about a ski trip he went on with Malinovskaya and several of their friends on Dec. 26, 2004 - three days after Zlotnikov's murder.
The prosecution had alleged earlier in the trial that contusions on Malinovskaya's body were caused during the attack of Zlotnikov. The defense tried to counter that through Gorelick, who said that Malinovskaya fell numerous times on the slopes that day and possibly suffered bruising.
"She fell on occasion," he said.
Gorelick's testimony was backed up by another friend, Ilya Knizhnik, as well as Dedov.
The defense also heard testimony from a forensic scientist who said that a DNA fragment found on a possible murder weapon came back with inconclusive results.
The sample "could have been from anyone," she said, adding that only one out of more than a dozen genetic markers were recovered from the sample.
When the trial resumes, the defense is expected to call Bondar to take the stand.
He was present in the courthouse yesterday but was unable to testify because of the early end to the proceedings.
