Ledesma guilty of shooting bartender
The mother of a Calgary bartender who was fatally shot during a botched robbery more than four years ago called her son’s killer a coward after he was convicted by a jury of second-degree murder on Friday.
“He was shot in the back. That’s a coward,” Kim Godin-Lubrano, who lost her only child Dexter Bain, 36, said outside court following the jury’s ruling. “That’s a coward that shoots not once, but twice. I can’t say anything less.
“That’s not just an accident, ‘my gun went off,’ that’s an, ‘I’m going to kill you,’” Godin-Lubrano, with husband Anthony Lubrano at her side, told reporters.
Godin-Lubrano said she and her husband, who drove here from their home in Kentucky for the trial, were pleased with the jury’s decision after deliberating into their third day, but it was still not a good feeling.
“It’s bittersweet,” she said. “My son is gone. Now at least we know Mr. Ledesma will not be able to hurt another family like he hurt our family and he hurt me.”
The distraught mother said her son was not even supposed to be at the bar when Ledesma and another man burst in the back door of Our Place Pub & Grill, 3709 26th Ave. N.E. on Nov. 27, 2010, at 3:30 a.m., after closing time. Bain had agreed to close up after a colleague called in sick.
Ledesma was a suspect shortly after the shooting, because he had been identified as having been in a nearby convenience store just minutes before the heist, but was not arrested until 14 months later after he confessed to undercover police officers posing as members of a fictitious criminal organization.
He told the covert city police officers many details of the shooting that only someone involved in the incident would know, such as the calibre of the murder weapon — a .22 calibre handgun — how many shots were fired and where the victim was struck.
Ledesma argued at trial that he only told the undercover officers that he shot Bain so he could appear to be tough and become a member of their fictitious group. He said he got the information from a friend, who claimed to be there, and from police reports released to the media.
He faces an automatic life sentence with no chance of parole for between 10 and 25 years.
When Court of Queens Bench Justice Sa Lo Vecchio asked the jury if it had any recommendation on parole, the jurors came back and said they had no recommendation.
Crown prosecutor Grant Schorn said in his final argument that two confessions by Ledesma made surreptitiously to the undercover officers about the fatal, failed heist are the most compelling and accurate evidence of what happened.
He told the jury that Ledesma knew many intricate details of the event and had no reason to lie to the covert officers posing as his friends in a fictitious criminal organization.
Ledesma, 32, told the same detailed story to the undercover officers on both Dec. 2, 2011, at Edmonton, and Jan. 16, 2012, at Vancouver.
The accused’s lawyer Rebecca Snukal told the jury that there was questionable identification of Ledesma at the scene of the robbery and shooting.
The accused told the covert officers the victim put up a fight and he shot him twice in the back before fleeing with 15 pounds of marijuana and $10,000 cash.
The case was adjourned to April 8 for sentencing arguments by Schorn and co-Crown Marta Juzwiak, defence lawyers Snukal and Pawel Milczarek.