MOULTRIE — A man accused of killing five friends and setting their house on fire offered a different scenario during an interview with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.

Jeffery Alan Peacock’s attorneys are apparently pushing that scenario even though the GBI agent’s interrogation tore the story down in the same interview.

The interview, which took place three days after the fire at 505 Rossman Dairy Road, was recorded, and about half of the seven-hour recording was played for the court at Peacock’s trial Wednesday.

Peacock had initially told investigators he had gone to get cigarettes and to get breakfast for himself and his friends about 8 a.m. Sunday, May 15, 2016, and when he returned to the house he found it on fire. His five friends — Jonathan Garrett Edwards, Ramsey Jones Pidcock and Aaron Reid Williams, all 21; Alicia Brooke Norman, 20; and Jordan Shane Croft, 22 — were found dead inside. A GBI autopsy later revealed they had been shot.

A number of things about Peacock’s story didn’t add up, and — among many avenues of investigation — officers of the GBI and the Colquitt County Sheriff’s Office tried to resolve those inconsistencies.

By Wednesday, May 18, they knew Peacock was lying to them, so GBI Agent Jason Seacrist asked him to come talk with him at the Colquitt County Sheriff’s Office. Seacrist had already decided to charge him that day, barring something in the interview that might change his mind.

According to other comments at the trial, Peacock maintained his original story until about four hours into the seven-hour interview. Then he was placed under arrest.

Prosecutors began playing the recording after GBI Agent Jason Seacrist completed paperwork connected with the arrest. At that point, Peacock is still steadfast in his claim of innocence.

“I did not kill my friends,” he says. “I did not set that house on fire.”

“I’ll agree with you to a point,” GBI Special Agent in Charge Bahan Rich tells him. “The Jeffery that’s sitting here right now did not do that …”

“Jeffery didn’t do this,” Peacock replies.

Rich mentions the possibility the killings were caused by “bad dope.” He mentions a recent incident in Americus where a man took some bad drugs and shot people.

Other testimony in the trial, which began Monday, has stated drug use was common among Peacock, the five people who died and many of their friends.

Rich leaves the interview room but Seacrist continues the interrogation.

Not long afterwards, Peacock gives a little.

“I did not go get cigarettes, but that’s beside the point now,” he says, acknowledgement of an inconsistency in his story that investigators already knew about.

He repeats over and over that he didn’t kill his friends.

“If you didn’t,” Seacrist says, “you at least know who did. Who?”

“I can’t do that,” Peacock replies.

Seacrist hammers the point, accusing him of covering for someone and denying truth to the grieving families. Peacock begins to cry.

“Does Jonathan deserve what you’re fixing to do?” Seacrist says. “… You’re throwing Jonathan under the bus. You’re throwing Jordan under the bus. And Reid. And Alicia. And Jones.”

Peacock’s wall continues to crack.

“One of the people that’s dead. It will tarnish their name now,” he sobs.

Seacrist prays with Peacock, asking God to “give him the power and the strength to tell the truth.”

“The only one alive when I got back was Jordan,” Peacock finally says.

Distraught throughout, Peacock describes getting back to the Rossman Dairy Road house from taking Mika Snipes home early in the morning of May 15. He arrived around 1:30 a.m.; he texted Snipes to let her know he arrived safely.

The front door was locked, Peacock says on the recording, so he walked around to the back and entered through the kitchen door. Jordan Croft had a bottle of Jack Daniels there and asked Peacock if he wants to finish it off with him. Peacock agreed.

In response to later questioning, Peacock estimates they were drinking shots for about 20 minutes — each had three and a half shots, he thinks, because the last shot wasn’t a full one.

Then Jordan pulled out a bag of cocaine, Peacock says, and invited him to snort a line with him.

“As soon as I snorted that first line, something was wrong,” Peacock says. “… I felt really weird and I didn’t like it.”

Peacock says he stayed in the kitchen with Croft for a while but eventually he started to move around to try to make the weird feeling go away. He moved into the living room, where he saw Jones Pidcock lying on the floor.

“When I left he was asleep on a recliner,” Peacock says.

As he got closer, he saw blood from Pidcock’s head wound. Once he reached Pidcock, he could see Reid Williams lying in the doorway of his bedroom. From there he went down the hall to the room that Jonathan Edwards and Alicia Norman shared. Norman was still in bed with blood all in the sheets. Edwards lay on the floor, leaning against the wall.

“To me it looked like he went to get out of bed and didn’t make it,” Peacock says.

He says he met Croft in the hallway outside the bedrooms. He started pushing him up against the wall and punching him.

“His emotion was nothing,” he says, although Croft did try to defend himself.

Peacock says he saw Croft raise a pistol and he took it away from him.

“I remember fighting with Jordan,” he says. “I remember getting the gun from him and shooting him. Pew! Pew!”

At more than one point he says he shot Croft twice.

He says he checked for a pulse or breathing on each of the victims, rolling some over to do so. All but Norman. He says she was shot in the eye and his military training taught him such a wound was fatal.

“I grabbed her and I held her,” Peacock says. “I cried for a second. I covered her back up.”

Peacock says that he then drank beer and smoked marijuana because he didn’t know what to do about the situation. At length, he hit upon an idea.

“I got to thinking the house has a really horrible electric … Maybe I could just start a fire and cover it up,” he tells Seacrist. “It didn’t work.”

Peacock describes scratching up Edwards’ wooden dresser with a knife and setting the shavings alight with a butane lighter. He says at one point it went out, but when telling the story another time, he says he exited the room to find something to kindle the fire with and when he returned he saw the fire had traveled to the comforter on the bed.

He says he got in his pickup and drove away. That’s when he got the idea to get breakfast and use it as an excuse to be away when the house caught fire.

In the recording, Seacrist sees several inconsistencies with the new story too. He’d been informed by investigators with the state Fire Marshal’s Office that there was evidence of flammable liquids being used to start the fire. Peacock never wavers, saying he did not use anything like that.

In point of fact, the GBI Crime Lab’s tests found no such accelerants in samples of the debris or on the clothes Peacock was wearing.

Nonetheless, fire investigators have testified the blaze had multiple origins, the most successful being in the front of the house.

But the big problem Seacrist mentions is the missing time. If Peacock returned from taking Mika Snipes home at 1:30 a.m., as his cell phone records indicate, then took 20 minutes or so to drink the shots, then a little time to snort the cocaine — that’s still only a little after 2 a.m. and he didn’t leave the house until 8.

Meanwhile, Seacrist tells Peacock, neighbors reported being awakened by multiple loud noises about 4:30 or 5 a.m. — well after Peacock came back.

“I’m struggling with them being dead before that because of the time frame,” Seacrist tells him.

Seacrist also knows about an earlier incident when Peacock got bad drugs — in that case, Xanax, which he implies Peacock bought on the street. No other testimony in the trial has mentioned the earlier incident.

At that time, Peacock got into a fight with someone named Seth but the next morning he didn’t know where he was or how he got there, according to statements both men make on the recording.

“From what I heard from witnesses you were off the chain, with no memory of it,” Seacrist says.

Seacrist continues poking at inconsistencies in Peacock’s story, trying to see what he can remember from the missing hours of the deadly night. Peacock says he can see flashes. At one point he says he sees himself “like you’re looking at me.”

“In flashes I’ve got the pistol in my hand,” he says.

“What’s that sight picture look like?” Seacrist asks.

“I couldn’t have,” Peacock responds.

Later …

“I can see myself shooting them,” Peacock says.

“Which ones?”

“All of them. … I can see it, but I don’t remember it.”

Back in February, Peacock’s defense attorneys sought to bar this interview from being used in the trial because of this line of questioning that attempted to get Peacock to recall things he didn’t immediately remember. Superior Court Judge James Hardy ruled the interview admissible, but the attorneys renewed their objection Wednesday.

The recording was played as part of questioning of Seacrist by the prosecution. After both sides finished questioning him, the prosecution rested.

The defense moved that testimony Dr. Gregory DeClue, a clinical psychologist, gave at that February hearing be included as evidence in the trial. In that hearing, DeClue referred to Seacrist’s methods as unsound and the type of “pop psychology” one might see on a television talk show.

The prosecution did not object to DeClue’s statements being included.

After that, the defense rested.

The trial will resume at 9:30 a.m. Thursday at the Colquitt County Courthouse Annex. The day is expected to begin with a motion from the defense team and closing arguments from both sides.

Because this is a bench trial, there is no jury and the verdict will be issued by Judge Hardy.