When the side door of Courtroom 4A opened at 10:17 a.m. on December 10, 2025, the room went dead quiet.

The boy who walked in no longer looked like the lacrosse-playing, Marine-bound senior from Smithtown High School West prom photos. The Austin Lynch who shuffled past the bench wore a bright orange Suffolk County jail jumpsuit, wrists cuffed in front, and a thick white bandage that wrapped from the top of his forehead, across the bridge of his shattered nose, and down to his upper lip. Only a narrow strip of pale skin and two dark, expressionless eyes were visible. The damage from the shotgun he allegedly turned on himself after killing Emily Finn was unmistakable.

He did not look at the gallery.

He did not have to.

Fifty feet away, Emily’s mother sat in the second row, clutching a framed photo of her daughter in a pink tutu. When Lynch passed, she let out a sound that was half gasp, half sob, then buried her face in her sister’s shoulder. A dozen of Emily’s friends stared straight ahead, jaws clenched, tears sliding silently down their cheeks.

The hearing itself lasted eight minutes.

Defense attorney William Wexler stood and informed Judge Stephen L. Braslow that his client was requesting a CPL Article 730 psychiatric examination to determine competency to stand trial. Prosecutor Dena Rizopoulos objected immediately, voice steady but edged with steel: “This defendant planned this murder for weeks. He does not get to hide behind a psych exam now.”

Judge Braslow set the next date for January 15 and reserved decision.

Lynch never spoke. He never lifted his bandaged head. When the deputies led him out the same side door, the only sound was the soft shuffle of jail slippers on linoleum and the click of handcuffs.

Outside the courthouse, the reaction was raw.

“He looked like a mummy,” one of Emily’s former dance teammates told reporters, voice shaking. “That bandage isn’t punishment. Emily is never coming back, and he still gets to breathe.”

Another friend, who asked not to be named, added: “We came here hoping to see remorse. All we saw was a monster wrapped in gauze.”

The photos (taken by pool photographers inside the courtroom) hit news sites within the hour. By noon they were everywhere: side-by-side images of the smiling prom couple from six months earlier next to the bandaged, hollow-eyed defendant of today.

Emily’s aunt, speaking for the family on the courthouse steps, kept it short and devastating:

“We don’t care how many bandages he has. We don’t care how many doctors he wants. Emily was shot in the back of the head while she was walking away. That’s all we need to know. We’ll be back here every single day until he’s held accountable.”

As the Finn family walked away, someone placed a single pink ballet slipper on the wet pavement outside the courthouse door.

It stayed there, untouched, for the rest of the day.