Smithfield — Ray Paddock told jurors he lied to deputies and social workers about what went on in their home because he feared his adoptive mother Lynn Paddock would beat him.

Ray said on the witness stand that he lied to detectives the day Sean died because he worried he would have nowhere to go. He feared that if he went back to the Paddocks' home, his mother would punish him for tattling her.

"I didn't want to be the one if she went home with us that night to be the one who told on her," Ray told jurors this morning. "I knew it wouldn't go well for the one who did."

Paddock, 47, is on trial for first-degree murder for the death of Sean. He was bound so tightly in blankets on night in February 2006 that he suffocated.

Defense attorneys picked through each of the statements Ray made to authorities after Sean's death. Ray admitted that he had probably made the statements included in the reports, but that most of what he said was meant to "protect Lynn Paddock."

Ray told jurors that Paddock coached him and his adoptive siblings on what to say to a social worker before an adoption agency representative came to ask if they wanted another child in the home. They posed for pictures to pretend that their family went on vacations and turned them over to social workers who were responsible for determining whether the Paddocks could adopt more foster children.

"We went to Florida and Alabama, but those were rare trips," Ray said. "It was all put on to make it look like we were one big happy family."

Paddock's children have accused her of beating them with plastic plumbing pipe, forcing them to exercise for hours on end and taping their mouths shut to keep them quiet. Each child offered his or her own story Wednesday and Thursday.

Jurors were dismissed at noon today because of a scheduling conflict with a defense attorney.

Testimony from Paddock's oldest children will resume tomorrow.

Each child offered his or her own story Wednesday.

Kayla Paddock, 11, told jurors that she remembered seeing her little brother Sean screaming, bound in blankets in the dark kitchen of their farmhouse.

Kayla told jurors she had worried about Sean. Lynn Paddock had bound her before, too, Kayla testified, and she knew how scary it could be.

Kayla, one of Paddock's six adopted children, described how she found Sean the morning he died, stiff legged and not breathing, wrapped in blankets on the kitchen floor.

On Wednesday, four of Paddock's adoptive children testified against her at her first-degree murder trial. Paddock is accused of torturing 4-year-old Sean by binding him so tightly in blankets that he suffocated.

Paddock dabbed her eyes as the children spoke. By Wednesday afternoon, her face was blotched from crying. She scribbled furiously on a notepad, turning it toward her attorneys as the children described one incident after another of her discipline.

Kayla told jurors that she had wrestled free of her own wrappings the morning Sean died. She tiptoed downstairs so as to not stir her mother. Kayla said she saw Sean barricaded by a cardboard "puppet tent." His legs were pointed straight in the air.

"I pushed [his legs] down and they came right back up," Kayla said, her voice barely above a whisper.

Kayla said she then pressed on Sean's chest, hoping to feel it rise and fall. It didn't. She scurried back to her room, terrified, wrapping herself back in blankets to wait for morning.

Kayla sneaked glances in court at Paddock, the woman who once welcomed her into her home after another adoptive family turned her away and kept her twin. Kayla's new mother stood at her side, caressing her hand, as the girl offered grim descriptions of life with Paddock.

"I noticed that if I cried, I'd get beaten more, and if I didn't, she let off a little," Kayla said.

Sean's two biological siblings Hannah, 9, and David, 11, shared their horrors, too.

Hannah, giggly and cheerful in a hot pink skirt, turned shy when prosecutors pressed her on being forced to eat her own feces and sit in a pan of her urine.

Hannah told jurors she had to go to the bathroom so badly one morning that she wet and soiled her bed, then threw her feces on the floor of her bedroom.

"Then, this gross thing happened," Hannah said, turning quiet and looking away, before whispering that she'd had to eat her feces.

On the witness stand, David sat still as a statue, offering little more than a yes or no when prosecutor Paul Jackson asked him about his time with Paddock.

"Are you happy you don't live [with the Paddocks] anymore?" Jackson asked David.

"Yes," he said, as his new mother sniffled behind him.

"Do you miss your brother?"

"Yes," he offered.

One by one, the former Paddock children climbed out of the witness stand Wednesday afternoon to show jurors how they said they were made to sit for hours in the Paddocks' kitchen.

They squatted, crossing their legs and, without a word, stared straight at the witness stand.