JURY HAD A THANKLESS TASK IN TRAGIC GAS-AND-DASH CASE
Members were exhausted, emotional after days of disturbing, graphic testimony
“I think it’s very hard to determine what’s in the mind of an offender at the time they commit an offence.”
Speaking in the soft tones he’s known for, Crown prosecutor Jonathan Hak goes to the very heart of the case he’s been arguing for the past two weeks. On Friday afternoon, the jury’s just come back in the trial of Joshua Mitchell, who in June of 2015 ran down a gas station cashier after stealing $113 of fuel from the station where she worked.
The Crown was hoping for a conviction of second-degree murder; the jury instead found him guilty of manslaughter, a crime with a wide variance in sentencing.
For those jurors, seven women and five men, a conviction on the lesser charge has left many of them exhausted and emotional. One female juror in the back row is sobbing, while others wipe away tears. The jury foreman reading out the convictions — which include hit and run where a death occurred, theft of fuel and possession of the stolen truck — is trembling, her voice cracking as she speaks.
In this troubling case with such a tragic outcome, the indisput- able facts included several days of disturbing, graphic testimony.
On that sunny Sunday June morning in 2015, Maryam Rashidi was chatting amiably with customers, her smiling face on the CCTV showing the university-educated Iranian newcomer doing her job with a positive attitude. Her pacing as she watches Mitchell’s passenger, 16-year-old Braydon Brown, gas up before the stolen Ford F350 truck drives off, provided the last recorded moments of her as a living, breathing human being.
Several witnesses took their turns replaying the horrifying events that came after, their emotions often betraying them, including: a teacher working seasonally at Home Depot, who tried to call out to the 35-year-old victim as she ran toward the truck stuck in traffic on 16 Avenue N.W.; and a physician who attended to the woman seconds later, but quickly determined that, referencing the Glasgow Coma Scale, the mother of a six-year-old boy was already at the “lowest level a living being can be.”
Then there was the pathologist who examined Rashidi’s mangled body, logging 33 separate wounds, along with what appeared to be tread marks on the backs of her legs, just another result from being run over by a truck weighing more than 6,000 pounds.
“He had the power of life or death over Maryam and he chose death,” Hak said Thursday in his closing arguments, his one last chance to try to convince the jurors to convict on the most serious charge. “And that is murder.”
The one person who could help further the argument was Braydon Brown, who served as Mitchell’s wing man and gas pumper, but was not charged with any crime.
Brown, who was also tearful on the stand, provided one of the only insights into what was going through Mitchell’s mind when he decided to hit the gas pedal while Rashidi was standing on his front bumper. “I’m going to go,” Brown, 16 in June of 2015, told the court Mitchell said just before accelerating and running over the victim.
Brown said when he looked out at Rashidi on the road, “it looked like her head exploded …”
For the jury, what was going on in Mitchell’s mind wasn’t quite so indisputable. They weren’t convinced — beyond a reasonable doubt — that in those chaotic moments, Mitchell had intended to kill Rashidi, or if it was an accident, which meant it was a case of manslaughter.
As the young man sits with little emotion, the judge addresses the jury: “I know it was a lot of work,” he says as he thanks them for their service. “You were conscientious and diligent.”
“I think that people mistakenly believe that being a juror is easy,” says Hak afterwards.
“It’s really hard when you have to sit in judgment of a fellow citizen. And it was clearly very difficult to do what they did.”