MARTINEZ, Calif. — Murder defendant Susan Polk wanted more time. Four days to cross-examine her teenage son was not enough, Polk said. She wanted "as much time as it takes to get to the truth."

But her time was up Tuesday at five minutes to 5 p.m. when Gabriel Polk finally left the stand, telling the jury, "See you later," as he walked out.

The court's order to finish questioning stood, despite Polk's objections.

Enough was enough, the judge said.

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"You have the ability to call him back as your own witness," Superior Court Judge Laurel Brady told Polk, 48, who is representing herself in her first-degree murder trial. She claims she stabbed her 70-year-old psychologist husband Felix Polk to death in self-defense after suffering from years of physical and mental abuse.

Polk had barely begun to ask Gabriel, 19, about the night in October 2002 when he stumbled upon his father's bloody body in the couple's $1.85 million estate.

"Didn't you say you wanted to 'gut him'?" Polk asked her son, tears streaming down her face. "Didn't you express absolute hatred for your father?"

Gabriel sternly denied his mother's accusation.

During his time on the stand, Gabriel testified that his mother's "delusional behavior" broke the family apart and caused the rift that kept him from having a close relationship with his father.

"I've made mistakes. I have to live with that," Gabriel said softly as he touched his forehead. "It's not easy that he's dead, that I can't say I'm sorry."

Susan Polk said she intends to recall Gabriel to the stand when she begins her case in chief.

She still has videotaped footage from his police interrogation, which she wants to show the jury and ask Gabriel about — clips in which he can be heard, at 15, crying as he tells his older brother Adam during a cellphone conversation that Mom killed Dad, and "I hope she gets the f---ing death penalty."

'Provoking a mistrial'

Gabriel Polk was the prosecution's first witness, in a trial that began March 7 and is expected to last two and a half months.

While Gabriel's testimony was interrupted for several days because of a juror and the defendant's illness, Susan Polk was repeatedly called out by the judge for her tedious questioning on "minutiae" that threatened to lose the jury's attention, Judge Brady warned, and which "bordered on the abusive" toward the witness.

Polk spent hours going over such mundane family issues as the cause of Gabriel's schoolyard fights, who was the better parent for attending Cub Scout meetings and school conferences, and who continues to look after the family pets.

For Polk, it is a tireless attempt to try to rehabilitate herself in front of the jury as a good mother and wife, in the face of Gabriel's damaging testimony that she fabricated stories, alienated neighbors and school officials, and willfully planned to kill his father once her alleged paranoia and delusions of persecution were aimed straight at Felix Polk.

But Polk's questions to her son, while they may have clear relevance to her as the mother of the witness, often got lost in the process of cross-examination.

"Are you aware your brother Eli scored 10,000 on Tetris when he was three years old?" Polk asked when Gabriel seemed to question his brother's intelligence.

Eli, 20, is the only Polk child who will testify in his mother's defense, and has continually defended her account of his father's abuse.

"Gabriel, didn't you put all the yarmulkes in the BBQ and light them on fire?" Polk asked later when Gabriel accused her of making anti-Semitic remarks about his Jewish father.

Susan Polk

Polk's argumentative and defensive demeanor in court, which occurs mostly — but not always — outside the presence of the jury, also does not appear to mend the damage of her son's accusations.

On Tuesday, she accused the judge of "aiding and abetting" the district attorney, and aligning with him against her. She accused the prosecutor of lodging unnecessary objections as a "tactic" to run out her last few hours of questioning. And she moved for a mistrial, based on the fact that she believes the prosecutor has been "provoking a mistrial."

Her motion was denied.

"It's interesting to me that the defendant keeps saying I'm provoking a mistrial, when she's asking for one," Assistant District Attorney Paul Sequeira remarked.

Polk declared that despite the court and the district attorney's alleged attempts to hinder her case, she would not give in or ask for legal counsel.

"I'm not going to give up," she stated at the end of court. "I'm going to continue to represent myself."

She faces 25 years to life if convicted.