“You can’t image how quickly the body gets cold,” Mike Mack, Rusty’s father, grimly told jurors about the painful decision to let his only child go.

After hearing witness after witness describe how Dacey kicked Mack without hesitation, bragged about it to friends and then invented a cover story to avert legal jeopardy, jurors deliberated three hours before finding her guilty of second-degree murder. Of the options they were allowed to consider, the panel chose the larger of the two degrees of homicide; the other was voluntary manslaughter.

In what some observers say was a compromise verdict, the jury also convicted Dacey of misdemeanor assault and battery, which was the smaller of the four wounding offenses available for consideration.

As the verdicts were read by retired Portsmouth Circuit Court Judge Dean W. Sword Jr., Dacey, now 18, tightly clutched in her hand a silver cross that was on a chain around her neck. She bowed her head and began to sob, and at another point shake, when she realized the enormity of the decision.

Defense attorney Mike Lee, a former Colonial Heights commonwealth’s attorney, cast his client’s actions as regrettable but argued Dacey kicked Mack spontaneously as a result of a startled reaction to being splashed with cold rainwater. She had no malicious intent, he said.