MARTINEZ, Calif. — Bay Area attorney Daniel Horowitz, a man who has spent his life defending accused criminals, took the witness stand Tuesday and testified against a teenage neighbor who is charged with the brutal murder of Horowitz's wife of 11 years.

"I take it, sir, you remember the date: October 15, 2005?" Prosecutor Harold Jewett asked Horowitz.

"Yes," he said with a somber expression.

Horowitz spoke calmly and slowly as he recalled the evening he came home to find his wife, former high-tech executive Pamela Vitale, lifeless in a fetal position on the floor inside the entryway of their home.

"The minute I opened the door ... " he stopped short, gazed upward, and shook his head. He took a few moments to compose himself. "It was just a scene of blood and Pamela lying there."

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"For a second, it was like I was looking at a crime-scene photograph," Horowitz said. "But I knew it was real."

He dropped his grocery bags. He screamed his wife's name, and fell to the floor to check for her pulse.

"I knew she was dead, but I touched her," he said, gesturing toward his own neck. "There was so much blood. Her hand was in a claw shape, swollen. It was so obvious."

Horowitz said he called 911, left the phone on the sofa, and returned to his wife. He cried and spoke to her before going out the door and standing on the deck.

"As I was going outside, I knelt down one more time. I touched her on the neck one more time, just to make sure," he said.

Horowitz told jurors that he and his wife had never met the defendant, 17-year-old Scott Dyleski, a neighbor and former Boy Scout, who is being tried as an adult for Vitale's murder.

Horowitz had a tenuous connection to the boy. He did free legal work on a civil matter for Kim Curiel, a woman whose husband owned a nearby house where about 12 people lived communally, including Dyleski and his mother, Esther Fielding.

Fielding would drop off papers in his mailbox, Horowitz said, and he had spoken to her, but he had never seen Dyleski before.

Earlier Tuesday, Dyleski sat alone at the defense table as counsel had a sidebar with the judge. Horowitz grimaced at Dyleski the entire time. The teen did not look back.