The first day of preliminary trial for James Michael Biela began Wednesday with testimony from two sexual assault victims allegedly linked to the case, the nurse who examined one of them and Brianna Denison’s friend who was with her on the night of her abduction.

State prosecution, assisted by District Attorney Dick Gammick, was attempting to produce enough testimony to bring Biela to trial for the rape and murder of Denison along with two other charges of sexual assault and one rape. The proceedings were sent into recess at about 5:30 p.m. Wednesday to be continued at 8:30 a.m. today.

The first woman to testify was the victim of an Oct. 22 rape in a parking garage at the University of Nevada, Reno. Following her description of the attack, the woman looked over to Biela with tear-filled eyes and identified him as her attacker.

The woman said she had kept her attack to herself, only talking to her roommate, until she heard of Denison’s disappearance. She then said she saw her attacker’s face on a local news Web site following Biela’s arrest. According to her testimony, the victim threw her soiled clothes in the trash immediately following the attack.

The second victim to take the stand, on the other hand, left her attack with significantly more physical damage and DNA-laden evidence. This victim described being taken from her apartment complex parking lot as she was coming home in the early morning hours of Dec. 17, 2008, driven to another location and asked to have oral sex by her abductor as they sat in a truck. The woman said she put up an initial struggle in her apartment complex parking lot where she passed out only to awake in the assaulter’s car.

The nurse who examined the second sexual assault victim following her attack also took the stand, testifying that immediately following the attack she collected DNA evidence from the badly bruised victim. The victim claimed that she could not positively identify her attacker because her eyes were either closed or obscured by a hooded jacket. However, this victim’s testimony did include a description of a truck and a small child’s shoe found in that truck.

The testimony then moved from prior cases to the highly publicized case of Brianna Denison as prosecutors called the woman’s friend, who was also the last to see her, to the stand.

The friend described her final hours with Denison, recounting a fun-filled night of parties mixed with a small amount of alcohol.

After the women came home from a concert, Denison went to sleep on the center room couch and the friend went to her own bed, she said. That was the last time she saw Denison.

Multiple members of the Reno Police Department also took the stand, recounting the methods they used to investigate Denison’s disappearance and what they initially found.

As the hearing continued into the early hours of the evening, lawyers had just barely begun to discuss the events leading up to Biela’s arrest.

Several detectives on the case described identifying Biela as a top priority on their lists before positively identifying him as a suspect through a tip from a friend of Biela’s girlfriend. They also linked Biela to the crime through a DNA sample from his young son, who carries Biela’s DNA.

Biela was arrested on Nov. 25 and initially charged with the murder of Denison by strangulation. Since that time he has been linked to other cases of rape and sexual assault, resulting in the subsequent charges.