COEUR d’ALENE — A fall from a five-story balcony, a cliff, or a car backing over the skull of a child could cause the kind of head injuries sustained by 17-month old Maliki Wilburn, doctors said Friday at the Coeur d’Alene murder trial of Joseph J. Davis.

A fall from an 18-inch coffee table wouldn’t do it.

The kind of injuries Maliki sustained in August 2016 in the downstairs apartment where he lived with his mother, Dacia Cheyney and Davis, her husband and Maliki’s stepfather, would have almost immediately shut down the neurological functions of the boy’s brain, experts said.

It probably would have prevented him from crying out.

Shortly thereafter the child’s body would have turned rigid as brain signals no longer reached the muscles of his arms and legs, a medical phenomenon referred to as “posturing.”

That is how medics found the boy, lying on the floor of his apartment, his arms and legs rigidly splayed, his head listing stiffly to one side, his eyes vacant under tightly closed eyelids, according to testimony.

“This was an inflicted injury, not one that occurred by accident,” Dr. John Howard, a forensic pathologist with the Spokane Medical Examiner’s Office said. “This required very high force at impact, similar to a motor vehicle crash.”

Davis, 31, who was arrested Aug. 26, the evening Maliki was injured, has pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder in the boy’s death. The child was considered brain dead at Sacred Heart Medical Center in Spokane that evening and he died two days later.

Davis told police he did not know how Maliki was injured. He was alone with the boy in the apartment, going to the bathroom, when he heard Maliki “screaming,” he said. The toddler was on the floor with his blanket, crying, when Davis checked on him, but he appeared to be dozing off. Davis said he suspected Maliki had fallen off a coffee table.

On the fourth day of testimony Friday, the second-floor courtroom of the former federal building in downtown Coeur d’Alene briefly turned into an alleged crime scene as the lights were turned off and footage from the body camera of Officer Jon Cantrell lit up a screen. The camera tracked the Coeur d’Alene policeman as he moved down the steps into a dark basement of the Fifth Street apartment on the night of the incident.

Cantrell, a member of a CPD community action team, which focuses its efforts in high-call neighborhoods, entered the apartment by walking through two vacant rooms, unfinished with studs instead of sheetrock on the walls. The footage jumps from wall to wall in the cramped living quarters that Davis, Cheyney and Maliki shared.

Lights from a neighboring room glare and a woman is heard hysterically crying. The voices of medics in an adjoining room murmur under the woman’s keening. Cantrell asks to talk with Davis and the two walk back through the vacant rooms and up the steps into the early twilight of a summer evening.

It is around 7 p.m.

Wearing the red T-shirt of his booking photo, Davis calmly talks with the officer, relaying how he was in the bathroom while his wife went to a nearby vape store.

“(Maliki) was screaming when she left,” Davis said. “He always cries when she leaves.”

The crying stopped when Davis was in the bathroom, then Maliki screamed and cried again, Davis told the officer. As Cheyney returned, the boy was lying on the floor holding his blanket like he had fallen asleep, according to Davis.

“She was going to grab him and he was stiff and she felt a bump on his head,” Davis said.

In the footage, Davis is sitting on the neighbor’s concrete steps, the camera from the standing policeman catches the top of his head. Red lights from an ambulance bounce from the side of the house like heartbeats.

“(Maliki) climbs up on the couch and bed,” Davis tells Cantrell. “We’ve been trying to teach him not to climb on stuff.”

In the quiet hallway outside of the courtroom, a heavily tattooed Antonio Wilburn, the child’s father, sat at the end of a bench wearing an energy drink ballcap. As a witness, he was not allowed inside. He recalled the night his son sustained the injuries that resulted in his death.

His ex-wife called him to tell him something was wrong with their son, Wilburn said.

“She was hysterical,” he said. “I headed to the hospital and was there 10 minutes before the ambulance.”

He met Davis and his wife outside, and came unglued.

“Me and (Davis) had an altercation in the parking lot,” Wilburn said.

Later on, he threatened to kill Davis, he said.

“I’m not pointing any fingers,” Wilburn said. “But he was left alone with my kid and something happened.”

Dr. Howard in his testimony Friday said he suspected the case was a homicide because it did not have the ingredients of any other high-impact, accidental cases he had seen over his lengthy career.

“There was no car crash, there were no high places,” Howard told the court. “In my entire career I have not seen a single case where a short fall produced the kind of head injuries Maliki had.”

The trial in District Judge Scott Wayman’s court resumes Monday at 9 a.m. on the second floor of the old federal building in downtown Coeur d’Alene. Davis is represented by public defender Jeanne M. Howe. Prosecutors Arthur Verharen and Laura McClinton represent the state.