Testimony continued Thursday in the preliminary hearing for two men charged in the deaths of nearly a dozen Livingston County residents.

Barry Cadden and Glenn Chin were charged with Second Degree Murder last year by the Michigan Attorney General’s Office for their roles in running the New England Compounding Center. Cadden was a part-owner and Chin was a supervising pharmacist at the facility in which authorities say lax conditions were allowed to infect steroids produced there that led to the 2012 outbreak that killed more than 100 people nationwide and sickened nearly a thousand others.

On the stand Thursday was Mary Brandt, of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who related her efforts to find the source of the tainted drugs. Brandt said that testing of samples taken from victims matched up with the exact fungus discovered at the NECC lab in Massachusetts.

Emails from Cadden were also entered into evidence by prosecutors. They were recovered from his computer after the FDA raided NECC's offices in late 2012. In one email Cadden instructed Chin to “hire more monkeys” to label drugs being shipped out. Previous testimony indicated that orders were coming in so fast to the company that workers had trouble keeping up the testing protocols and that untested drugs were being labeled as tested and then shipped out.

Today is expected to be the final day of testimony in the case, after which both sides will submit briefs to 53rd District Court Judge Shauna Murphy for her to make a determination whether the case should be sent to circuit court for trial. (JK)