PHILADELPHIA _ As he crept past a roped-off stanchion, up a ramp and into a darkened room at the Franklin Institute, Michael Rohana knew he was somewhere he wasn't supposed to be.
He had slipped away from his friends while attending an after-hours "Ugly Sweater" Christmas party at the museum. And using his cellphone as a flashlight, the inebriated 24-year-old began to scan the area around him.
Stern gray faces etched from clay leered out from the shadows _ the visages of 10 life-sized soldiers from a 2,000-year-old Chinese terra-cotta army.
Pretty cool, he thought, grabbing one of the figures in a side embrace and mugging for a selfie.
As he prepared to sneak back out, Rohana stopped to examine one more: An elaborately armored statue positioned next to a sculpted clay horse. Rohana reached toward the warrior's hand, grasped its left thumb, and pulled.
That decision _ one Rohana later described as a drunken, stupid mistake _ would quickly ripple across the globe. It would spark an international incident with China, expose Pennsylvania's most popular museum to questions about its security failures and eventually land Rohana in federal court.
It would also lead to an unusual trial in Philadelphia featuring testimony from a host of fine-art experts eager to challenge each other's qualifications and, in the process, expose an inherent clash between the subjective world of art appraisals and the justice system's demand for proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
And last week, that one thoughtless act left a jury in Philadelphia flummoxed, unable to reach a verdict after absorbing a week's worth of testimony and evidence that for the first time revealed the full story behind the prank that grabbed headlines around the world.
But as he stood in the darkness two years ago with a broken clay thumb in his hand, Rohana couldn't have envisioned any of that.
He simply shoved the finger into his pocket and ran.
"I still don't know why I did it," he would tell jurors more than a year later. "I just don't know what I was thinking."
