MOBILE, Ala. -- After hearing a knock, Christopher Kyser Miree opened the front door of his midtown Mobile home, and four men barged inside and demanded money, according to court testimony Wednesday.

Three of those four men later told police that Miree slipped and fell onto the floor, and he was "crying and stating that he didn't have anything," said Mobile police Detective Charles Bagsby.

Miree was "on his back with his hands up in a defensive position," Bagsby said, and "he was begging them for his life."

Michael Jerome Lee, 19, then shot Miree once in the head, the detective said.

That account of what happened at 4 Macy Place the night of April 16 was recited during a preliminary hearing in the capital murder cases against Lee and three other young men: Bo Ellis Taylor, 18; Jamal Breon Lang, 20; and Ernest Teryl Wiggins, 19.

Each of them has pleaded not guilty to capital murder.

During the hearing, court police increased security, moving the proceedings to a separate courtroom and using metal detectors as people entered the room.

At one point, Lee was escorted out of the courtroom -- apparently for talking during the detective's testimony -- and he punched a wall on the way out. He was not brought back in.

Bagsby said Lee refused to answer questions by police after his arrest, but the other three men confessed their roles in the nighttime robbery and shooting.

Miree, a 23-year-old Vanderbilt University graduate and Birmingham native, worked as an engineer at the Chevron Corp. refinery in Pascagoula. He lived on Macy Place with a roommate, Curtis Wright, police said.

The night of the shooting, a friend of Wright's went to a Wachovia Bank ATM near Bel Air Mall before driving to the Macy Place house to pick up Wright and head downtown, Bagsby said.

The four defendants were driving around, looking for people to rob, and they followed the friend from the ATM to the house, Bagsby said.

While the foursome parked nearby, Wright and his friend left, leaving Miree home alone, Bagsby said. The four men then walked over to the house and knocked on the door, he said.

Meanwhile, Miree's girlfriend noticed that Miree stopped responding to phone calls and text messages about 11 p.m.

She called Wright -- who is her brother -- and they drove over to the house to check on him, Bagsby said.

"When they got there and entered the residence, they discovered the victim ... shot on the floor and laying in a puddle of blood," Bagsby said.

During the investigation, a Mobile woman told police that she knew the four men, and while they were at her house, she heard them making up a story that the shooting was an accident, in the event police questioned them, the detective said.

Lee told her that he struck Miree with the gun, and it fired accidentally, Bagsby said.

Lee's girlfriend also told investigators that Lee confessed to the shooting and claimed it was an accident, Bagsby said.

A forensic scientist has ruled, based on the evidence, that the shot had to have been fired a minimum of 1 foot away, making the accident story impossible, Bagsby said.

Mobile County District Judge Michael McMaken sent the case to a grand jury.

After the hearing, Lee's attorney, James Byrd, said he wasn't sure why his client was taken out of a hearing in a case in which he faces the death penalty.

"I'd be upset, too," Byrd said.

All four defendants face the death penalty or life without parole, if convicted.

(Updated at 5:48 p.m.)