INDIGENOUS MAN’S 2016 DEATH RECOUNTED IN COURT.
Indigenous man’s 2016 death recounted
HAMILTON • The very first words out of Peter Khill’s mouth after he shot and killed Jon Styres suggest he did so because he thought Styres was about to shoot him.
The shooting happened about 3 a.m. on Feb. 4, 2016, on the muddy driveway of Khill’s home along a country highway just outside Hamilton. It was a black and moonless night with virtually no ambient light.
The 29-year-old Styres was a resident of the Six Nations Reserve not far away. Prosecutors have told Ontario Superior Court Judge Stephen Glithero and a jury that he was trying to steal Khill’s old pickup truck.
“He was in the truck with his hands up — and not like, not with his hands up to surrender, but his hands up pointing at me,” Khill told a 911 operator after his thengirlfriend, now wife, Melinda Benko, had called for help.
“It was pitch black, and it looked like he was literally about to shoot me, so I shot him … I, I mean I didn’t want to lose my life, so …”
Minutes later, Hamilton Police Const. Matthew Robinson placed Khill in the back of his cruiser, arrested him (at first for attempted murder, but he is now charged with second-degree murder) and read him his rights. Robinson asked him if he had any questions, and Khill said, “What do I even ask?”
Robinson reassured him “it’s going to be all right” and Khill said, “Like, I’m a soldier. That’s how we were trained. I came out. He raised his hands to, like, gun height. It was dark. I thought I was in trouble.”
(Jurors have heard that before he met Benko, the 28-year-old served as an army reservist, but have been given no further details.)
Khill asked another officer, Det.-Sgt. Tim Knapp: “Am I going to be OK?’
Remarks such as Khill’s, made freely and contemporaneously in times of great stress, are called “utterances” in the language of the court. They are often given considerable weight at trial because they seem spontaneous and thus genuine.
Khill and Benko were living together in the Highway 56 house; they have since married, and she is now six months pregnant.
Khill’s job in the “mechanical service” sector, his lawyer Jeff Manishen said, kept him on the road for long stretches. In fact, he’d been away the week before the shooting, Benko testified Wednesday, and she’d been unnerved by two incidents — once at night and once in the middle of the day, while she was working from home — where she’d heard the telltale loud beeps of someone punching numbers into the keypad lock of their door, the lock start to engage and then stop.
When Khill came back, she told him about it, and he changed the pass code.
On the morning of the shooting, she said, they were asleep in bed when she heard two “very loud knocks,” or bangs. A light sleeper, she awoke immediately and said, “Wake up Pete! Pete, Pete, you hear that?”
She feared, she said, the sound was coming from the front door, or that someone was in the house or the garage.
As Khill woke up, she said, there were two more knocks or bangs, “and he did hear that.”
He hopped out of bed and went to the window, which overlooks the driveway and their parked vehicles, his pickup and her car.
He told her, “The truck lights (dashboard lights) are on.”
Benko went to the window then, and saw the same thing — the dashboard lights were on, “but there was no indication anyone was actually in there.”
Behind her, Khill was going to the bedroom closet and getting his shotgun; she didn’t recognize it at the time, she was so petrified, but later realized it was the sound of him loading the Remington 12-gauge gun.
Clad only in his boxers and a T-shirt, with nothing on his feet, Khill told her to stay inside; she heard him go down the hall and the stairs.
Though just two clicks down the road there’s a busy intersection with big-box stores and housing developments, this part of the highway was quasi-rural. There were no street lights, no sidewalks, and rolling fields opposite their house.
Jurors have heard police witnesses testify about the total darkness around the house.
Benko stood frozen at the window, her body flooded with adrenalin. She heard Khill leave the house, briefly setting off a light that works on a motion sensor; it blinded her momentarily.
When she looked back, “I see a silhouette pass over the light (in the truck, meaning someone was inside) and I can’t even warn Pete,” she said. “It was the silhouette of a person in the truck (on the passenger side), leaning over.”
The jurors have been told that the passenger side lock of the truck had been punched in, the ignition column damaged; a screwdriver was found beside Styres’ body, and he was wearing a glove.
Benko heard muffled yelling, then saw sparks and heard an extremely loud bang. “Then I freaked out and called 911,” she said. “I didn’t know who shot, if Pete … I was hoping Pete would shoot first, if he had to.”
That excruciating call was played for the jurors; in it, Benko was panting, sometimes whimpering with fear, sometimes almost whispering, as if she was afraid she might be overheard. As she listened to it, she wept briefly in the witness box.
Periodically, Khill was recorded in the background; other times, he spoke directly to the operator, once telling him he’d done six or seven minutes of CPR on the man, but, “he’s got nothing, no pulse.”
The timeline of the 911 call, and the mud on Khill’s knees, appear to corroborate that account.
Styres died almost instantly from two shotgun blasts, one to his chest, the other to the rear of his right shoulder.
The trial continues.