GOSHEN -- When Vicki McClain looked out her sliding-glass door and saw a little girl trying to carry her infant brother, she knew something wasn’t right.

She and her boyfriend brought the children in on that day in March 2008. Little Natalie told them her mom was hurt. “She said, ‘My mom is bleeding,’” McClain told jurors in Elkhart Circuit Court this morning, April 17.

Today is the first day of testimony at the murder trial of Tyrice Halliburton, Kiska’s neighbor at the time, who’s accused of stabbing Sheena Kiska to death inside her apartment on Bristol’s west side March 18, 2008.

“I called 911,” McClain said.

Natalie was shocked, sober, said McClain. “She said she didn’t want to go back there.”

When Bristol Marshal Mike Swallow got to River Shores Apartments, he convinced Natalie to tell them where she lived so they could try to help her mom.

Natalie led them to the building and pointed to the apartment, but wouldn’t go in.

McClain took both children back to her own apartment, and Swallow knocked on the door. Getting no answer, he opened the unlocked door.

There was nothing he could do for Natalie’s mom, Sheena Kiska.

She was lying face-up in a pool of blood. “Her face was covered in blood. There was also a large wound in the side of her neck,” Swallow testified. A knife lay on the floor nearby.

Halliburton faces up to life in prison without parole in the slaying of the 23-year-old woman.