After nearly a month of gut-wrenching testimony from more than two dozen witnesses, a jury is set to start deliberating Friday morning in the case of Sergio Correa.

Correa faces 14 charges in the brutal slayings of Kenneth, Janet and Matthew Lindquist during a drug deal turned home invasion almost four years ago in Griswold. If convicted, the 30-year-old from Hartford faces more than a lifetime in prison without the possibility of parole.

Attorneys for both sides delivered lengthy closing statements Thursday morning, each trying to discredit the other side’s argument as they addressed the jury for more than 40 minutes each.

Supervisory Assistant State’s Attorney Stephen M. Carney repeatedly pointed his finger at Correa as he enthusiastically told the jury that in the state’s opinion, there is no doubt that Correa is guilty of the long list of crimes he is charged with. That list includes one count of murder with special circumstance, three counts of murder, two counts of arson and two counts of robbery.

He outlined what he called “hallmarks of verisimilitude” — examples of how testimony by Correa’s adoptive sister Ruth Correa was corroborated by other evidence, lending credibility to her play-by-play of that night of mayhem. Ruth Correa this summer took a plea deal with the state, pleading guilty to the three counts of murder in the Lindquist deaths and agreeding to take the stand against her brother.

More than 50 people, including dozens of family and friends of the Lindquists and a few of Correa's relatives, packed the courtroom in New London Superior Court on Thursday, the most crowded day yet of the trial. Correa remained quiet throughout the proceedings, dressed in a navy blue suit and a disposable face mask.

Summarizing some of the most graphic evidence brought forth in the trial, Carney walked the jury through the events of the night of Dec. 19 and early morning hours of Dec. 20, when prosecutors say Ruth and Sergio Correa finally left after hours inside the Lindquists' house, which they are accused of setting ablaze.

The state alleges the pair had driven to Griswold as Sergio Correa exchanged dozens of desperate texts with 21-year-old Matthew Lindquist, who was asking to trade his father’s guns for heroin and cash.

Once there, prosecutors say the deal went wrong, and Sergio Correa followed the youngest Lindquist into the woods and attacked him with a machete. The Correa siblings then stabbed Matthew Lindquist to death and left his body in the woods, where it wouldn’t be found for five months. A medical examiner testified the youngest Lindquist was stabbed 67 times.

Prosecutors then repeated the horror they say was unleashed in the Lindquists’ house: how Kenneth Lindquist’s skull was smashed with a baseball bat into more than 30 pieces; how Ruth Correa struck the family's golden retriever, Skylar, so hard with a golf club that it broke; how Janet Lindquist cowered in fear before being beaten and strangled; and how the siblings stole the family's cash, jewelry, a heated blanket and all of their Christmas presents, then set the home on fire.

Carney said this chain of events was backed up by Ruth Correa’s eyewitness account of how the night unfolded, with her brother painted as the mastermind behind the crimes, and by cellphone evidence. Phone records, he said, showed text messages and locations in which Correa’s phone, and phones belonging to the Lindquists, pinged on those dates.

“One phone went from Griswold to Hartford and four phones went back to Hartford,” Carney said.

According to testimony by investigators who examined those records, Sergio Correa’s phone went from Hartford to Griswold, back to Hartford, and the Lindquists' phones all made their way to Hartford after they were killed.

Attorney Joseph Lopez, one half of Correa’s defense team, likened the state’s case to a “three-legged stool.” Their case, he said, depends on evidence from the cellphone belonging to his client, testimony from Ruth Correa and testimony from Sergio Correa’s ex-girlfriend Tanisha Vicento.

The defense poked holes in Ruth Correa’s testimony — as they did during their cross-examination of the sister and throughout the trial — pointing out discrepancies in her statements and asking the jury members to consider whether or not they could trust her.

Lopez, taking a shot at the other side’s closing statements, called these “hallmarks of dishonesty.”

He asked the jury to consider Ruth’s state of mind “at the time she pointed the finger at her brother” during an interview with police in May 2018. She testified that she was smoking marijuana every day, drinking Hennessy in the mornings, was not medicated for multiple mental illnesses and was feeling abandoned by her family at that time.

Lopez told the jury that Ruth Correa, whom attorneys had to repeatedly ask to speak up as she testified in court last month, was not the “soft spoken, kind of flat person” she appears to be now at the time of the crimes and police interviews. As he clicked through a PowerPoint presentation, he showed videos of Ruth Correa talking loudly and emotionally to detectives in 2018 as she talked about her relationship with her brother, who at the time she thought wanted her dead.

“Is this someone who is a stable person at that time? A trustworthy and honest person at that time?” Lopez asked the jury.

In another slide in his presentation, he showed the jury a photo of Ruth Correa with a knife poking out of her ripped jeans the morning after the murders and reminded them that she’d told investigators she didn’t have a knife on her at the time.

This, he said, was just “one of the many, many different lies that she admits to.”

When Ruth Correa took the stand against her brother, she described in harrowing detail what she remembers from the night of the crimes — from the sound of skulls cracking to the smell of blood. But she showed no emotion while doing so.

She did, however, break down in tears when defense attorneys asked her about her children and what it was like to be away from them while in jail. Lopez reminded the jury that when she told police her brother was the mastermind in the murders, she was facing a lifetime in jail away from her children and was “given a ticket out” by the state’s offer. He said her emotion about her children may have been an “incentive” for her to “lock in a story” that implicated her brother.

The defense also spoke at length, once again, about a hair that was found in Matthew Lindquist’s mouth that medical examiners testified did not belong to any of the Lindquists or the Correas.

“Maybe that magical hair just flew through the air and landed in his mouth,” Lopez said. He then asked the jury whether that hair made them pause.

Lopez then attacked the credibility of statements by Tanisha Vicento, who testified for the state that her ex-boyfriend Sergio Correa confessed to her and that he wasn’t home the night of the murders. He said she was coerced into speaking out about her then boyfriend by the fear that she might lose custody of her children and accused police of using intimidation tactics.

In her part of the defense's closing statement, attorney Corrie-Ann Mainville asked the jury to consider the credibility of the two witnesses and to consider whether “the police conducted a fair unbiased search for the truth” or if they “search(ed) for an arrest.”

She told them to remember that they could not find her client guilty if they had any doubt.

“Weeks and months and years from now, you'll know you made the right decision,” she said, looking to her client. “On behalf of Sergio Correa, we are asking, please make sure you get it right.”

In a brief responding statement, Carney said that Ruth Correa confessed and told her account of the crimes only after police broke down her door and not as part of “some well-thought-out plan to implicate her brother.”

He said he wanted to leave the jury with a “top 10 list” of reasons the state is confident of Correa’s guilt, including evidence that Sergio Correa and Matthew Lindquist were upset with each other; that Sergio immediately deleted the messaging app he used to talk to Matthew and had his car reupholstered; that he allegedly confessed to his then-girlfriend; and that all of the victims were first struck in the head, which he said indicates that the same person attacked each of them.

Judge Hunchu Kwak spent the last hour and a half of the court day giving instructions to the jurors, which took until after the 5 p.m. end of the court day.

The jury is scheduled to return to the courtroom Friday morning and then begin deliberations.

t.hartz@theday.com