SAN DIEGO — David Westerfield's fate now rests with a jury.

The panel of six men and six women rose from their seats at 1:10 ET Thursday morning and filed into a jury room to deliberate murder, kidnapping and child pornography charges in the slaying of Danielle van Dam, Westerfield's 7-year old neighbor.

Westerfield watched solemnly as the jurors gathered purses, water bottles and stacks of the red steno pads they have filled during the two-month trial and silently departed. At the rear of the courtroom, Danielle's mother, Brenda, pulled a tissue from her purse and dabbed at her eyes. The last picture ever taken of her only daughter, a passport photo snapped the day she vanished, remained propped on the prosecution table. The choker she wore lay at its base.

Dusek delivers his final summation Thursday morning.

Westerfield, a 50-year-old design engineer who holds several patents, faces the death penalty if convicted. Prosecutors claim that despite his "normal, regular guy" appearance and clean record, Westerfield was a pedophile who stole Danielle from her canopy bed one night last February, raped and then killed her.

Prosecutor Jeff Dusek finished his summation Thursday morning by telling jurors to listen to what the young victim was telling them from the grave.

He pointed to hair, blood, fiber and fingerprint evidence connecting Westerfield to the crime and asked jurors to imagine a "miracle" — that Danielle could come back to life and speak to them for a moment.

If they asked, "Who did this to you?" he said, she would reply, "I've already told you."

He ridiculed the defense suggestion that all the forensic evidence could be explained by police contamination or a Girl Scout cookie-selling visit Danielle and her mother made to Westerfield's house three days before the abduction.

"It doesn't wash," said Dusek. "What was going on there that she just innocently dropped those [strands of hair and pieces of fiber]?"

He said defense lawyer Steven Feldman had offered no explanation for a one-inch stain of Danielle's blood on his client's jacket.

"This is the smoking gun," said Dusek, referring to Feldman's claim during his summation Wednesday that the case was all speculation with no "smoking gun."

The jury is not sequestered for deliberations.

Judge expels reporter

First thing Thursday morning Judge Mudd booted a radio reporter from the courtroom after she refused to name the source of an apparently accurate account of a private meeting between the judge and lawyers.

The hearing Wednesday afternoon concerned what Mudd referred to as a security issue. Mudd said he was stunned when he heard coverage of the hearing, including his reaction, on the radio just 45 minutes after lawyers left the court.

Mudd called the broadcast a "serious breach of security" and confronted the reporter, River Stillwood of the talk radio station KFMB, from the bench.

"My question, Miss Stillwood, is will you voluntarily tell me the source of your information?" Mudd thundered at Stillwood, who immediately stood up in her seat in the front row of the court.

"Your Honor, I was not at the station. I do not know the source," Stillwood stammered.

"Goodbye," Mudd replied. Bailiffs escorted her from the court.