SAN DIEGO -- None of the nine wounds 12-year-old Stephanie Crowe suffered the night she was stabbed to death kept her from screaming or crying out for help, a former county medical examiner testified Tuesday.

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Dr. Brian Blackbourne testified that the seventh-grader was probably sleeping on her stomach when her attacker or attackers struck Jan. 20, 1998.

Blackbourne testified that he did the autopsy on Jan. 22, 1998, and found two stab wounds that cut main arteries and were potentially fatal.

He told attorney William Fletcher, who represents murder defendant Richard Tuite, that the victim could have screamed despite her wounds.

Fletcher asked the witness if a cry for help would be a natural reaction once the stabbing started.

"One would certainly think so," Blackbourne told the jury.

The witness agreed with Fletcher that Stephanie's screams could have been muffled if a pillow were held over her mouth.

An expert who conducted a crime re-enactment will testify it is more likely the seventh-grader was killed by two assailants, one holding down a comforter and one stabbing her, Fletcher told the jury in his opening statement at trial.

Tuite, 34, initially was dismissed as being too clumsy to commit the killing.

But the San Diego County Sheriff's Department took over the investigation from Escondido police, who had singled out others for the crime, and the state attorney general's office charged him with the girl's murder in May 2002, based on lab testing of blood found on a sweatshirt he was wearing the night of the killing.

Blackbourne testified that depending on the stabbing motion, the wounds inflicted may or may not have come from a "Best Defense" knife investigators initially thought was used to kill Stephanie. That knife was found under the bed of one of the initial suspects.