Mother of Thomas Liming testifies at son's Riverhead trial he was distraught the night he killed Kyle Underhill

Not long after an Islip man returned home from killing a high school friend in some nearby woods, it was clear to his mother that he was distraught and had been attacked, she testified Monday at her son's trial.

Kim Liming, 52, said her daughter, Elaine, interrupted her bath the evening of Nov. 16, 2011, to tell her something was wrong with her son Thomas, now 23 and charged with second-degree murder in the death of Kyle Underhill, 18. Liming's defense is that he killed Underhill while defending himself.

"He was shaken up," Kim Liming said of her son that night, during questioning by defense attorney Joseph Corozzo of Manhattan. "He seemed to be like in shock. He was in a fight, I could see. His face was swollen, his nose was not straight. He wouldn't stop shaking."

She said he had just emerged from a shower and she couldn't calm him down. "He couldn't talk good," she said.

For about a half-hour, she said she called family members, including her brother, cousin and her husband, Keith Liming, who was out of town on assignment with the Air National Guard.

"I was scared," she said, when Corozzo asked why she called them before calling police. "My son was attacked. I didn't know what to do."

She then called 911, telling the operator, "My son said it was Kyle."

As a recording of her 911 call played for the jury and state Supreme Court Justice Mark Cohen, she wiped her eyes. Several jurors at that point were gazing instead at members of the Underhill family.

After an officer arrived and began talking to Thomas Liming, she got on the phone with an attorney who told her to stop the interview immediately, which she did. She and her family left to stay with her brother and met the next day with Corozzo and private investigator Jay Salpeter, she said.

Earlier in the trial, a Salpeter associate testified that she moved Liming's car to another part of Islip the next day and that she tried and failed at Kim Liming's request to find threats made to her son by Underhill on Facebook.

During cross-examination, Assistant District Attorney Raphael Pearl tried to establish both that Liming was spending time with Underhill that Kim Liming didn't know about and that Liming knew how to fight.

She acknowledged that her son was on the high school wrestling team for about two years and that he took a few lessons in 2011 in Krav Maga, an Israeli martial art. She told Pearl she didn't know if in those classes "he was taught how to choke people."

An autopsy determined that Underhill was bludgeoned, strangled and buried alive in a marshy grave with two sticks jammed in his mouth.

"You know your son killed Kyle Underhill, correct?" Pearl asked Kim Liming.

"I guess," she replied, apparently taken aback by the question.

"You guess?" Pearl said. "Do you think Kyle Underhill is going to walk through this door?"

She told Pearl that her son was not friends with Underhill.

In response to his questions, she also said she didn't know then that her son and Underhill were chatting on Facebook, that they'd had what Underhill called a "heart-to-heart" discussion at lunch weeks before the killing or that her son had repeatedly sought out Underhill the last week of his life, including the day he killed him.

"Obviously, you have no personal knowledge of what happened in those woods on Nov. 16, 2011, correct?" Pearl asked Kim Liming, who agreed.

"Only two people know what happened -- Kyle Underhill and Thomas Liming. And one of them's dead, correct?" Pearl asked.

"Yes sir," she replied.