Tessa Majors’ father showed up to a Manhattan Family Court room Tuesday during the first pre-trial hearing in his daughter’s murder case.
Inman Majors, an novelist and English professor at James Madison University, wore a navy blue suit and a blank stare during the two and a half hour long hearing and occasionally grew emotional — closing his eyes for long periods of time and breathing loud sighs.
The hearing will be the first of many as Manhattan prosecutors gear up to try 13-year-old Zyairr Davis for Tessa Majors’ murder while building a case against two other teen co-defendants believed to be responsible for the Barnard College student’s tragic December death.
Davis, who was picked up by police on an unrelated trespassing charge a few days after Tessa Majors was killed, admitted to cops he was present for the robbery that led to the student’s death but denies he was the one who plunged the knife into her chest.
Inman Majors sat for the duration of the hearing alongside another man, who was not identified, and declined comment to The Post on the way out.
He was sporting a beaded bracelet with the musician and aspiring journalist’s entire name — Tessa Rane Majors — that was hugged by two red peace signs.
Meanwhile Davis, wearing a black Calvin Klein puffer jacket, a white baseball shirt and black pants, looked to the floor and bit his nails when Police Officer Randys Ramos Luna testified on how he tracked the teen down.
The NYPD obtained grainy surveillance video that captured three kids in khaki pants and book bags leaving Morningside Park around the same time and place as the murder and presumed they could be students at nearby P.S. 180 in Harlem on the other side of the park.
Luna went to the area to see if any kids matched the descriptions from the video and ended up finding Davis inside a private residential building on Morningside Avenue, about a block from the school, in the same black jacket and red sneakers as one of the kids captured on video.
The officer questioned Davis on what he was doing at the building and then showed him a snap of the surveillance video that depicted the jacket and the shoes.
“These are the same sneakers,” Davis told Luna, without being asked, as he lifted up his leg to show him, Luna testified.
Davis was then arrested for trespassing and was ultimately questioned about the murder.
The day after Davis was arrested, Luna “learned” the private building the kid was arrested from was not part of the city’s “F-Tap” program, which allows cops to patrol various floors of a building.
It’s unclear if that will have any impact on the investigation. Luna will be cross-examined Wednesday when the hearings resume at 10 a.m.
Davis’s trial is set for March 16.