(CNN) A judge declared a mistrial Monday, October 16, in the case of a Mississippi teenager who was burned to death three years ago. The jury failed to reach a verdict. 
 
 Quinton Tellis, 29, was charged with capital murder because 19-year-old Jessica Chambers' death in December 2014 occurred during the commission of another crime, third-degree arson. 
 
 If convicted, Tellis could have faced life in prison after prosecutors did not seek the death penalty. Tellis, who was charged in 2016 while he was in prison on an unrelated charge, did not take the stand in his own defense in the trial that started October 9. 
 
 There appeared to be confusion among jurors before the judge declared the mistrial. The jury said it had reached a verdict and the court clerk read the not-guilty verdict recorded on a piece of paper. But at the prosecution's request, the judge polled the jury, and most jurors said their vote was guilty. 
 
 The judge reread the instructions. More than an hour later, the jury said it was deadlocked and couldn't reach a unanimous verdict after about nine hours of deliberation. 
 
 The state plans to retry the case 
 
 District Attorney John Champion said prosecutors plan to retry the case, CNN affiliate WREG reported. 
 
 Champion said he didn't consider the mistrial a loss. 
 
 "I've had hung juries many times ... and on the retrials we've come back and been successful on them. Some we have not," he told reporters. "You do this as long as I've done it, you're going to have days like this." 
 
 Defense attorney Alton Peterson said the confusion among jurors surprised him. 
 
 "I've been practicing 19 years," he said. "And I've never seen it happen before. It was very unusual," he said, WREG reported. 
 
 He added: "Beyond that, I'm not really sure what to say about it." 
 
 ATF: Teenager was set on fire with gasoline 
 
 Chambers had left her mother's house in pajama pants on December 6, 2014, reportedly to clean her car. Later, firefighters responded to a report of a car fire and found her in the burning car on a rural road near her home in Courtland, a northwest Mississippi town of about 500 people in Panola County. 
 
 Chambers was set on fire with gasoline, said investigators with the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. 
 
 She suffered third-degree burns over 95% of her body. 
 
 During the trial, eight first responders, including firefighters, testified they were at the scene when Chambers sad, "Eric set me on fire." She didn't give a last name. 
 
 Chambers died the next day in a Memphis hospital. 
 
 The defense focused on the fact that Chambers didn't name their client. 
 
 "She said Eric," Alton Peterson, one of Tellis' lawyers, said in closing arguments. "E.R.I.C. Eric." 
 
 But Champion, the district attorney, argued the fire severely injured Chambers and she could not pronounce her words clearly, and she may have been trying to say "Tellis," the Clarion-Ledger newspaper reported. 
 
 Prosecutors: Tellis deleted phone communication with teen 
 
 Local police, the FBI and an intelligence expert worked the case for months and looked at all people named Eric and Derek in the area after Chambers' death, authorities said. 
 
 The prosecution said it used cellphone technology, texts records, surveillance cameras and interviews to identify Tellis as a suspect. 
 
 At the time of Chambers' death, Tellis had deleted all communications with her from his phone and stopped checking on her, prosecutors said. 
 
 Tellis, who grew up in Courtland, had known Chambers for about two weeks, a friend said. 
 
 Tellis was arrested in February 2016 while he was an inmate in a Louisiana prison for using the debit card of a woman who had been killed, authorities said. He is still the prime suspect in that slaying, authorities said. ||||| A judge reportedly declared a mistrial in the case of a Mississippi man charged with killing Jessica Chambers, who was burned alive in her car. 
 
 
 
 This is the second time a jury failed to reach a verdict on murder charges against Quinton Tellis, 29. 
 
 Tellis had faced a capital murder charge for killing Chambers, then 19, in December 2014. A grand jury first indicted Tellis in 2016, but a trial in 2017 ended with a hung jury. The jury in the second trial began deliberating on Sunday. 
 
 
 
 Chambers was discovered burned alive in her car in Courtland, Mississippi, on December 6, 2014. When first responders arrived at the scene, Chambers was still alive but covered in second- and third-degree burns. She later died from her injuries, but not before reportedly telling medical personnel that "Eric did this to me." 
 
 The killing subsequently gripped the nation and ignited a cottage industry of internet sleuths determined to solve the case. 
 
 
 
 Months after Chambers' death — and with no suspects arrested — District Attorney John Champion called it "the most baffling case [he'd] ever worked on" in 22 years of employment with Panola County. Eventually, the local investigation expanded to include officials from the FBI, the US Marshals Service, and the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. Officials put up billboards in three different states hoping to turn up leads and offered a $54,000 reward. 
 
 The breakthrough came after investigators analyzed "technological data" including cell phone records, Champion told reporters in February 2016, leading to Tellis's arrest and indictment for Chambers' murder. 
 
 "It wasn't until we received information from subpoenas and began analyzing information we obtained that certain things began falling in place," Champion said. 
 
 Chambers' father, Ben Chambers, said at a news conference at the time that his daughter "is at peace now." He also said that Chambers had never mentioned Tellis's name to the family. ||||| Lisa Chambers of Courtland, Miss., in the background, has waited nearly three years for justice in the murder of her 19-year-old daughter, Jessica Chambers. (Photo: Stan Carroll, The (Memphis) Commercial Appeal) 
 
 BATESVILLE, Miss. — Three years after a 19-year-old woman was burned alive on a road in rural Mississippi about 60 miles south of Memphis, a man that she reportedly had a relationship with is facing the death penalty in connection with her killing. 
 
 In the first day of trial for Quinton Tellis, now 29, first responder Cole Haley said he was so shaken by his encounter with the badly burned Jessica Chambers that he was traumatized for months. 
 
 "She had her arms out, saying, 'Help me, help me, help me,' " Haley testified Tuesday, wiping away tears. "Her hair was fried like it had been stuck in a light socket. Her face was black, and her body was severely burned." 
 
 Haley and two other firefighters had responded to a truck driver's call about a car fire Dec. 6, 2014, on Herron Road just outside Courtland, Miss. 
 
 ► February: Man indicted in teen's fiery 2014 death still awaiting trial 
 
 ► July 2016: Suspect pleads not guilty in fiery death of 19-year-old woman 
 
 He saw Chambers in the middle of the road, clothed in her underwear and no bra. The former chief of the Courtland Volunteer Fire Department said his first reaction was to get a blanket to wrap around Chambers to help "conceal her." 
 
 After wrapping a blanket around her, Haley walked Chambers to the back of his fire truck. When "she couldn't go anymore," he laid her down, and she reached out for his hand. 
 
 “She had her arms out, saying, 'Help me, help me, help me. Her hair was fried like it had been stuck in a light socket.” Cole Haley, Courtland Volunteer Fire Department, on Jessica Chambers 
 
 He asked her name and she responded "Jessica Tambers." With her mouth "just charred black," Haley said he realized she was trying to say Jessica Chambers. A coroner later would say that Chambers had burns over 98% of her body. 
 
 Haley told the seven-man, five-woman jury that he knew Chambers before that night, but the two were not friends. Courtland has about 500 residents. 
 
 The trial is happening in the Panola County seat here less than 10 miles from the scene of the crime. Because of worries that Tellis — a black man eight years older than the white, teenaged Chambers — would not receive a fair trial amid all the publicity in the unsettling case, the jury was selected more than 200 miles south in Pike County, Miss., and transported Monday night to Batesville. 
 
 In a written statement to investigators hours after the crime, Haley said Chambers told him that someone named "Eric" had set her on fire. On the witness stand, he backtracked, saying he was in a daze when he made his initial report. 
 
 "I was face to face with her, and you could barely understand her," he said. "She kept asking for water. ... I did not personally hear her say 'Eric.' " 
 
 A lawyer on Tellis' defense team, Darla Palmer, is using Haley's initial statement as a foundation of her client's defense. In Palmer's opening statement Tuesday, she said at least eight first responders in the trial expected to last two weeks will testify that Chambers said someone named Eric had set her on fire. 
 
 ► May 2016: Suspect in torching death of Miss. teen sent back from Louisiana 
 
 ► February 2016: Suspect indicted in Jessica Chambers burning death 
 
 Several first-responder witnesses called to the stand Wednesday said she appeared to say "Eric," but she was difficult to understand because of her charred mouth and the loudness of rescue equipment in the background. 
 
 Tellis, who graduated from the same high school as Chambers, was in Batesville buying a pre-paid debit card for his girlfriend in Louisiana at the time Chambers was attacked, Palmer said. Prosecutors believe that Tellis intentionally went to the store after Chambers' attack, creating an alibi for himself. 
 
 Quinton Tellis, 29, charged with burning 19-year-old Jessica Chambers to death almost three years ago, looks away as he sits in a Batesville, Miss., courtroom, waiting for his trial to begin Oct. 10, 2017. (Photo: Rogelio V. Solis, AP) 
 
 On Thursday morning, jurors will visit the site of the fire, M&M Grocery where security camera footage last recorded Chambers that evening and Tellis' home nearby, said Major Barry Thompson, lead investigator for the Panola County Sheriff's Department. The field trip will give the Pike County jurors a chance to see first hand the sites that Prosecutor John Champion said will be tied together via cellphone records. 
 
 Tellis was indicted in February 2016 in connection with Chambers' death as he sat in Ouachita Parish Jail in Monroe, La. What the jury doesn't know, at least not yet: By July 2016, Tellis was charged with first-degree murder in another case, the July 29, 2015, death of Meing-Chen Hsiao, 34, of Taiwan. 
 
 The University of Louisiana-Monroe exchange student had been stabbed 34 times until she gave out the personal identification number for her debit card, according to a warrant filed in July 2016. Previously, Tellis had been in the parish jail accused of using Hsiao's debit card three times after her death. 
 
 In Louisiana, Tellis also had been charged with one count of possession of marijuana with intent to distribute, a charge he pleaded guilty to in May 2016. Tellis won't return to Monroe to face trial in the Hsiao case until the conclusion of the Chambers trial. 
 
 In Mississippi, Chambers' best friend, Kesha Myers, told jurors Tuesday that Chambers was "selling drugs every day." 
 
 Chambers' mother told the court that she last spoke to her daughter at 6:48 p.m. CT, about 90 minutes before the truck driver made his call about the car fire. Lisa Chambers said her daughter left the house about 5:15 p.m., saying she was going to clean out her car and get something to eat. 
 
 Jessica Chambers died at Regional One Health-Memphis where she had been airlifted about four hours after being lit afire. 
 
 ► August 2015: Jessica Chambers' father: 'We're near the end' 
 
 ► February 2015: Authorities release more details on burned teen's last day 
 
 The prosecution's case in Mississippi will hinge largely on cellphone data that place Tellis and Jessica Chambers together much of the day she died. Tellis previously told investigators that he had been with Jessica Chambers for part of the night she died, authorities said. 
 
 Champion said Tellis and Jessica Chambers had sex in the passenger seat of her car, then Tellis smothered her and set her car on fire. 
 
 Contributing: Ron Maxey, The (Memphis) Commercial Appeal; Therese, Apel, The (Jackson, Miss.) Clarion-Ledger; Ashley Mott, The (Monroe, La.) News-Star. Follow Sarah Fowler on Twitter: @FowlerSarah 
 
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– When first Mississippi responders came upon Jessica Chambers, she had been set on fire and was covered in second- and third-degree burns; she reportedly uttered "Eric did this to me," before dying. Attorneys for Quinton Tellis, the man on trial for her December 2014 death, argued that made for reasonable doubt, reports BuzzFeed. At least some members of the jury apparently had it: A judge on Monday declared a mistrial in the case. Tellis' first trial, in 2017, ended in a mistrial as well. Tellis was arrested in early 2016 after the local DA said a break in the perplexing case came via "technological data" like cellphone records; a DOJ analyst told the court Saturday that Tellis' phone data indicates he was with Chambers the night she died and that he wiped Chambers' texts and info from his phone after her death. BuzzFeed notes that Chambers' father had previously said Tellis' name wasn't known to the family, and the prosecution in this trial described a relationship between Chambers and Tellis that was only a week old. The Clarion Ledger reports the prosecution sought to chip away at the "Eric" detail: The medical director at the Firefighters Burn Center estimated she had been on fire for as long as five minutes, and he and a speech pathologist both testified that they don't believe the 19-year-old was capable of intelligible speech based on the severity of her burns. Tellis' attorney, Alton Peterson, thought doubt remained: "When you have eight trained first responders who were there on the scene ... it's hard to get around her telling them with her dying breaths that someone else did it." FOX13 reports prosecutors plan to "assess things" and then announce if they'll try Tellis a third time.