A 12-member jury and two alternates today saw and heard a 13-year-old girl describe how her stepfather, Kristopher Henriqson, had started raping her when she was 9 and continued to do so until the February 2025 day when she went to her middle school homeroom teacher and told her what he had been doing to her for the past three years. “I couldn’t take it anymore,” she said.
What the jury did not see was the skillful way the judge–with the help of the prosecutor and a singing tip from the assistant public defender–brought her around and let her know she could speak louder than the fearful whisper she had brought to court as she sat for the first time in 15 months within a few feet of the man who, last she saw him in the same room, had allegedly raped her.
The judge had to recess the jury twice, got the girl talking about her hobbies and her cat Onyx and let the attorneys reassure her they would not “jump out and bite you,” as the attorney for the defense. Maybe she was unaware that an attorney, not her former stepfather, would be cross-examining her.
She made it through, Henriqson watching her. When she stepped off the witness stand, she did what witnesses rarely do: she took the long way around, walking as far distant as she could from the defendant’s table, before the victim advocate walked her out. The jury, not being familiar with witnesses’ usual beeline for the center path to the exit, would not have known that the girl’s exit spoke as loudly as had her whispers.
The jury also heard and saw a 47-minute video of the girl in a forensic interview with a Child Protection Team therapist describe in similar detail the routines of Henriqson’s assaults, and how she did not disclose any of it until then, and only to a teacher, because she feared her stepsister or her mother would not believe her.
In mid-afternoon, the jury heard Henriqson in two phone calls recorded without his knowledge confess to the rapes as he told the girl’s disbelieving mother that his assaults had been going on “for about a year.” He denied sodomizing her. He did not deny assaulting her vaginally and orally.
“You’re going to fucking die,” the girl’s mother told him. Her tone left him with no doubt that she was serious.
“Why?” he asked. “I’m just not thinking right now, I’m flustered, I’m sorry.” She repeated her threat. “I need you to stop, please, can we please regroup so we don’t all fuck this all up?” he said.
“I’m going to fucking murder you.”
“No.”
“No? No? No isn’t fucking in your vocabulary,” she says, making vomiting sounds as he speaks. “If I see you I’m going to fucking murder you. I don’t think you even get it. I’m going to hunt you down.”
“I know it’s like a crazy situation, but we need to work it out,” he tells her. “You’re like my baby. I love you. I love the kids to death.”
He did not get it. Perhaps that’s why for months of pre-trials, he had decided to represent himself and continued to do so through the first day of trial on Monday.
The two recordings were painful to hear, lengthy–about 40 minutes each–and, to Henriqson, who listened to them with the same impassivity of tone he used in the two conversations, little short of damning.
He seemed, if not exactly oblivious to the gravity of the accusations, at least clueless about the fact that his world as he knew it had ended. He thought he had merely made a mistake, a “misjudgment,” as he called it, but that he and his girlfriend–his ex, now–could talk it out. He kept calling her “babe.” She kept telling him “you are a fucking predator.” He wanted her to come home. She never wanted to see his face again.
“How long, have you been fucking my child so I know how many fucking bullets to put your head,” she told him. “I live with a predator. You are a fucking predator.”
“No, I’m not, babe.”
“She just tripped and fell on your dick? How do you start fucking an 11 year old? A 10 year old?” she asked him.
He had initially described his assault as “we fooled around,” as if he were talking about a summer fling. He had no clue.
The calls were chilling. He didn’t seem to realize that, either.
Assistant State Attorney Melissa Clark played both recorded phone calls in full, well over an hour’s worth, as the jury listened, rapt, some of them at first taking some notes but then just listening as the child’s mother elicited Henriqson’s confessions and downplaying. She made him believe that she was on her way to the hospital where her child had been transported following a miscarriage.
The mother had testified before the tapes were played. She referred to her ex as “Kristopher Henriqson” or “Mr. Henriqson,” never once referring to him by his first name alone, let alone a nickname. When the prosecutor asked her to identify him, she described him, but did not look at him.
Henriquson, 48, faces 11 charges of raping and molesting the child in her Palm Coast home for two to three years. Three of the charges are capital felonies. He faces life in prison if convicted. His second day of trial today did not go better than his first as Assistant State Attorney Melissa Clark marshalled what appears to be insurmountable evidence: not just the two phone calls riddled with his confessions, but also the girl’s oddly clinical testimony and, timed like a kicker as the final bit of evidence in Clark’s case, DNA from Henriqson’s semen collected from the girl’s chest.
The night before she disclosed the alleged assaults her homeroom teacher, she had been in her parents’ room as her mother, a dancer, was showering before going to work. He fondled her breasts, she testified, and stopped when her mother got out of the bathroom. He walked her mother out to her car. When he returned, she asked him to check her grades through a tablet. He told her she’d have to service him first. She testified he ejaculated on her chest, used a baby wipe to clean her up, and threw it out. She did not shower that night.
The next day, after her disclosures, a Child Protection Team nurse, who also testified today, swabbed samples from her chest after a special light had “fluoresced” the likely presence of sperm there. The DNA samples were analyzed by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement’s Jeannelyn Adona, who testified to the results in late afternoon: the DNA profile extracted matched Henriqson’s.
“For the sperm fraction of the abdomen swab, it’s a single source male fraction. It’s a lot of DNA,” Adona said. There is one chance in 5.4 quintillion that it was not his, she said. (5.4 quintillion is 675 million times more than there are people on the planet.)
As far as skin cells were concerned the test revealed the presence of three DNA types that did not belong to the girl.
The worst decision Kristopher Henriqson had made on Monday was to insist on continuing to represent himself in his trial. The result was disastrous, once he began his opening statement, which did not get far before the prosecutor objected and the judge stopped him. At the judge’s urging, Clark reduced the 12-page statement to a few permissible lines, which Henriqson read to the jury before taking his seat.
He made a better decision at 9 p.m. Monday when he tapped out and called in Assistant Public Defender Spencer O’Neal, who had shadowed him for months of pre-trials, at the court’s request, since Henriqson had essentially fired him.
O’Neal provided a technically solid defense through cross-examinations of each witness today, but landed no punches, least of all where Henriqson wanted to land them most: against his former stepdaughter. In pre-trials, he had claimed she was a liar. He wanted to impeach her credibility. None of the questions O’Neal asked her either rattled her or damaged her testimony, even though she said repeatedly that she could not remember many of the details he was asking her about, and despite the oddly clinical, often evasive answers she provided.
By the time the prosecution rested at close to 5 p.m. today, even Henriqson’s decision not to take the state’s offer of 45 years in prison months ago seemed as poor as his decision to represent himself.
Henriqson told the court he is not testifying, but O’Neale is calling one witness on Wednesday before the two sides present their closing arguments. The jury is expected to start deliberating by midday if not before. Even though it’s a 12-member jury, lengthy deliberations are not likely. They may not last much longer than the judge’s reading of the jury instructions.
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