A defense attorney for a Nicolae Miu, accused of first-degree intentional homicide in a 2022 mass stabbing on the Apple River, asked a prosecution witness Monday morning if his group’s “taunting” of Miu provoked the stabbing.

Defense attorney Corey Chirafisi hammered at Owen Peloquin of Afton, who was a rising senior at Stillwater High School when he went on a tubing trip in July 2022 that ended in the stabbing death of Stillwater teen Isaac Schuman.

Peloquin testified that his group was floating the Wisconsin river when they spotted Miu, then 52, alone in the knee-deep water. One in the group shouted that Miu, of Prior Lake, was a “raper.”

“He was looking really weird, and we were kids,” Peloquin testified.

Chirafisi intimated Peloquin’s group was responsible for the escalation because they were recording it on cell phones, and that they easily could have floated past Miu instead of accosting him.

Miu, who is standing trial in St. Croix County Circuit Court, also faces four counts of attempted first-degree intentional homicide in the stabbings of four others that day. He faces the possibility of life in prison.

Throughout the trial, Miu’s attorneys have consistently questioned defense witnesses about their behavior that day, portraying them as unnecessarily antagonistic toward Miu. Miu’s attorneys have questioned prosecution witnesses about why they began calling Miu a pedophile.

Several in Schuman’s group testified they heard Miu say he was “looking for little girls,” blaming that comment on starting the confrontation. But Chirafisi has pointed out the “little girls” comment wasn’t captured on video and that witnesses didn’t mention it to police after the incident.

On Monday, the sixth day of trial, Peloquin testified Miu saying “something about little girls” sparked the confrontation.

“Couldn’t really make out fully what he said, but I heard him say something about little girls, and that didn’t sit right with any of us,” Peloquin testified. “We were screaming at him, ‘Pedophile, get out of here!’ ‘You’re a weirdo!’ What a normal person would do.”

But Chirafisi continued to insinuate it was Schuman’s group that instigated the fatal confrontation.

“It was all so quick,” Peloquin replied. “We were just young kids that were curious what was going on, and we wanted to see it finish what we were seeing.”

“You wanted to see it finish because it was on tape, right?” Chirafisi questioned. “Jawahn Cockfield was videotaping this entire thing, isn’t he? You wanted to see how this tape played out.”

“I wouldn’t say we ever did it just for, like, a camera, like a video,” Peloquin said, adding that his group observed Miu talking with two young women and didn’t want to leave them alone until they observed how the conversation played out because “he scared us.”

Chirafisi showed stills from a video of the confrontation, showing several in Schuman’s group surrounding Miu, pointing and chanting at him.

Chirafisi: “Do you believe your actions there with the rest of your friends are taunting him?”

Peloquin: “It could be considered that, yeah.”

Chirafisi: “Would you agree the more you guys are calling him names — pedophile, predator — the higher the temperature is getting? Meaning the more aggravated people are getting?”

Peloquin: “I don’t know other people’s feelings… By the end, I was in complete shock because I saw a bunch of people stabbed.”

Also on Monday morning, the surgeon who tended to A.J. Martin, one of the victims who survived, testified that the case stood out from all the previous trauma incidents he’d worked on.

“I’ve not had a patient with that large of a penetrating wound previously,” said the surgeon, Brian Myer.

Martin had previously testified that he told the surgeon he was going to die. Martin’s heart stopped for nine minutes on the helicopter en route to the hospital, and then again in the hospital. He spent 27 days in the hospital and had multiple follow-up surgeries.

The trial before St. Croix County Circuit Court judge R. Michael Waterman is expected to last through the end of this week.