Supporters of Karen Read packed the sidewalk across the street from the courthouse, anxiously awaiting a verdict during a day dramatized by a series of questions from the jury. But by 4 p.m., the judge sent the jury home to come back a resume deliberations in the morning.

Those charges never should have been brought forward,” Aidan Kearney said Tuesday outside Norfolk Superior Court, where he was covering jury deliberations in the Karen Read trial.