Both the state and the defense rested after a sheriff’s deputy, a sketch artist, the defendant’s brother and a firearms expert testified in Washington County Common Pleas Court Thursday during the murder trial of Mitchell Ruble.

Ruble, a former Washington County Sheriff’s sergeant who was fired in 1979, is accused of shooting and killing sheriff’s office Lt. Ray “Joe” Clark through the window of his Dodd Run Road home on Feb. 7, 1981.

After a day of defense witnesses took the stand Thursday, the defense rested, and after a scheduled long weekend, closing statements and jury deliberation are scheduled to begin Monday morning.

Included in testimony for the defense was Brandon Giroux, owner of Giroux Forensics in North Hill, Mich., whose experience includes training as a tool mark and firearms examiner for the FBI and extensive cross-country lab work for law enforcement and court cases.

Though Giroux’ testimony was fairly short, his examination of the shotgun shell found at the crime scene on Dodd Run Road was meant to refute state witness testimony of the high probability that the shell was fired from a specific make and model of a shotgun that Ruble had.

“The characteristics observed on the shell are consistent with a wide range of shotguns and manufacturers,” Giroux said. “Any 12-gage shotgun could have fired that shot shell.”

Giroux testified that he analyzed reports from the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation, and agreed with findings that stated that the shotgun shell could not be matched to a specific shot gun.

In previous testimonies, it was revealed that the shotgun shell found at the crime scene was a No. 4 Buck. Defense attorney Lawrence Whitney asked Giroux how many of those types of shells have been manufactured.

“I wouldn’t be able to guess, but I’d say at minimum, hundreds of thousands of shells,” Giroux said, noting that his research indicated that that particular type of shell was made available to most firearms distributors in the 1980s.

Previous state testimony has revolved around the possibility that a Stevens Model 520 shotgun was used to kill Clark, a particular model that had allegedly passed from Ruble to his friend, Brannon Gerald, just a few years after the murder.

“Based upon physical evidence, I can’t tell what make or model the firearm was,” Giroux said.

Giroux also cited data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives that revealed that a variety of gun manufacturers had made between 200,000 to more than 7 million shotguns each from 1986 to 2010. He said that based on his own expertise, that the data was likely indicative of how many shotguns are typically manufactured each year on average in the 20th century.

In cross examination, Ohio Attorney General Prosecutor Joel King asked Giroux how much he was being compensated to testify in court, to which Giroux said that he was being paid $300 an hour.

Mark Ruble also took the stand Thursday on behalf of his brother’s defense, but testified to a very specific area of the case, also pertaining to firearms.

Whitney held up a 520 Stevens shotgun to Ruble and asked if he owned one just like it, to which he answered yes. Whitney then asked how he came to own one.

“We got it from the Ohio National Guard,” Ruble said. “They were selling them as World War I and World War II-era shotguns. If my memory serves me correct, there were several deputies who bought them.”

Mark Ruble, a former Washington County Sheriff’s deputy himself, said that Clark, along with several other deputies, including his own brother and then-Washington County Sheriff Richard Ellis, had all purchased the same make and model shotgun from a National Guard sale in Columbus around the same time.

“Can you say whether or not that this was at one time your gun?” Whitney asked, holding up a shotgun submitted as evidence.

“Not positively, but it was just like that,” Ruble said.

Whitney asked Ruble who had ended up with his gun, which he made the decision to sell. Ruble said he sold it to Jerry Brannon, who testified Wednesday that he his wife had purchased it.

“Mitch delivered it to him,” Ruble said, noting that prior to Mitchell Ruble brokering a deal to sell his brother’s gun to the Brannons, that the defendant had never had it in his own possession previously.

Ruble went on to testify that both he and his brother both frequently reloaded guns themselves, and used and reloaded with a variety of ammunition, including the No. 4 Buck.

“Do you remember telling police you never loaded a buck shot of any kind?” asked Ohio Attorney General Prosecutor Daniel Breyer, during cross examination.

The state played a short clip from a July 2015 interview with Mark Ruble in which he stated that he himself did not load that type of shot.

“I don’t remember telling them that,” Ruble said.

In addition to testimony from Ruble and Giroux, the defense also called Steve Flinn, who worked as a composite sketch artist in the Parkersburg area from the late 1970s until 2008.

Flinn, a self-taught artist who used a system call Identi-Kit to make composite drawings from witnesses, sketched a composite of the man that a number of witnesses saw in a car parked off Cole Coffman Road on the night of the murder. He testified that a multitude of witnesses described the suspect to him to allow him to build a composite.

Eric Gilkerson, a shoe print and tire print specialist who works for the FBI, could not be in court to testify Thursday, and instead submitted a statement that was read aloud in court.

The statement concluded that the footwear cast impression taken from the crime scene originated from a “military, work or some other type of footwear,” but that it could not be narrowed down to a specific manufacturer or brand based on a lack of markings.

Washington County Sheriff’s special deputy Bruce Schuck, who began testifying as the state’s final witness Wednesday, also finished his testimony Thursday before defense witnesses took the stand.

Schuck testified about the search warrant executed at Mitchell Ruble’s Ohio 530 residence in Lowell shortly after his arrest, noting that among items recovered were a pair of military-style boots made in 1977 and 937 rounds of ammunition.

Closing statements are scheduled to begin at 9 a.m. Monday after the court recessed for the weekend Thursday. Jury will begin deliberation soon afterward.