A Baltimore jury is deliberating the fate of a 17-year-old accused of raping and murdering his 83-year-old neighbor when he was 14, making him among city’s youngest-ever homicide suspects.

Tyrone Harvin is on trial for the 2018 sexual assault and death of Dorothy Mae Neal.

Late Tuesday afternoon, Circuit Judge Jennifer B. Schiffer dismissed jurors after they sent a note indicating that they were struggling to reach a verdict. The note said one juror was refusing to participate, Schiffer told counsel. She dismissed jurors for the day and asked them to return Wednesday to continue deliberations.

Neal was found after a neighbor called police when she had not been seen in several days. An officer found her barely breathing behind the door of her locked apartment on Winchester Street in West Baltimore, and she was taken to a hospital where she died hours later.

Inside her apartment, police and crime lab technicians found used condoms, condom wrappers and a lamp that was later determined to be the murder weapon, all of which had Harvin’s DNA and fingerprints, according to Elizabeth Stock, who prosecuted the case.

“The physical evidence tells you Tyrone Harvin did it,” she told jurors during closing arguments Tuesday morning.

The teen’s attorneys, however, have argued that the fingerprint and DNA evidence was faulty and did not prove Harvin had raped and murdered Neal, or that he was even inside her apartment at the time of the attack. They also questioned the Baltimore Police Department’s practices for processing the evidence.

“They wanted to get this solved. This was a big case,” Harvin’s public defender, Robert Linthicum, told jurors during his closing arguments.

Harvin turned 14 the same month Neal was found, and he was charged shortly after her death.

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