Chancey Luna, guarded by sheriffs, walked into the Oklahoma courtroom in the same bright blue, collared, long-sleeved shirt he wore the previous day.
Peter and Donna Lane sat about 10 metres away in the front row of the public gallery.
The grieving couple had flown from Melbourne looking for answers to the most tragic day of their lives.
Mr Lane locked his eyes on the 17-year-old, staring at the young man who fired a .22 calibre revolver into his 22-year-old son Chris Lane's back and left him to die on the side of a road in the city of Duncan, Oklahoma, on August 16, 2013.
It was the first time Mr Lane had seen Luna in the flesh and he appeared to be repulsed, turning away abruptly after his eyes had seen enough.
"It has been a very, very hard day," Mr Lane said as he walked out of Duncan's District Court on Tuesday.
Ms Lane didn't look at Luna at the first moment, but glanced across later as assistant district attorney Cortnie Siess and Luna's lawyer Jim Berry made their opening statements on the first day of the murder trial.
Berry dropped a bombshell early in the proceedings.
He told the jury Luna shot Chris Lane as he jogged along Country Club Road, not too far from the courthouse.
The court heard how Luna was in the backseat of a Ford Focus driven by 17-year-old Michael Jones, and another friend, 15-year-old James Edwards Jr, was in the front passenger seat rolling a joint.
Berry told the jury Luna made a reckless, unplanned, horrible judgment call by firing the gun out of the car "to scare the jogger".
Luna is charged with first-degree murder. If convicted, he could be sentenced to life in jail with no chance of release.
But Berry said to convict Luna of the charge the jury would have to find the murder was premeditated and there was no evidence of that.
"I think the evidence will establish there are other degrees of homicide," Berry said.
Siess rejected this, telling the jury of seven men and five women Luna intentionally pulled the trigger.
"This case is senseless," the prosecutor said. "This case is tragic."
Edwards Jr has become a prosecution witness and testified how Jones and Luna picked him up on the day of the shooting.
He said there was no discussion about killing anyone and just "three or four" minutes into the drive he heard a loud bang from the backseat where Luna was sitting.
Luna later told Jones he thought there were blanks in the gun, Edwards Jr said.
The first witness of the trial was Sarah Harper, Chris Lane's girlfriend.
She told how they met at an Oklahoma college four years earlier where Chris had a baseball scholarship and were back in her home town of Duncan after a five week trip to Australia.
She was at the local country club working in the golf professional shop when police came by.
"They said he was shot and he did not make it," Harper told the court.
The trial continues.
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