‘I still have nightmares,’ passenger tells murder trial

Witness says truck drove over attendant

CALGARY • The passenger in a truck involved in a fatal hit and run cried as he described seeing the fear in a gas station employee’s eyes and the colour drain from her face before she was run over.

Braydon Brown jumped into the back seat when Joshua Cody Mitchell fled the parking lot at the Calgary Centex station in June 2015.

Mitchell, who is 22, is on trial charged with seconddegree murder.

Maryam Rashidi, 35, chased the truck out into traffic and climbed onto the hood in an attempt to get the driver to come back and pay for $113 worth of fuel.

“She started banging on the window and said, ‘You didn’t pay,’” Brown, who is now 18, told court Tuesday.

“He said, ‘If she gets in front of me I’m just going to go.’ As soon as she got onto the hood, I told Josh to shake her off. Then he put the truck into reverse and tried stepping on the gas quickly to try to get her to fall back off the hood.”

The driver then swerved around the vehicle in front of them, causing Rashidi to fall to the ground, where she was run over by the truck’s front and rear dual tires.

“I could see the look of fear in her eyes as soon as he put it in drive. They got big and then her face went white,” Brown said as he tried to hold back tears.

“I felt the boomp, boomp, boomp in the truck. I looked out the back window and all I seen is her body rolling and it looked like her head exploded. It looked like she had coughed up blood while she was rolling.”

Brown testified before the seven-man, five-woman jury that Mitchell didn’t stop and drove away quickly since two other cars were following them.

That day still haunts him, he said.

“I still have nightmares about it,” Brown said.

Mitchell’s lawyer Kim Ross suggested they never intended to hurt anyone.

“I’m going to suggest to you that the intention was like any other gas-and-go — to get gas, fill up that truck and go. At no time was there any conversation in that truck about hurting somebody?” asked Ross. “No,” replied Brown. Rashidi never regained consciousness. She suffered multiple head injuries and died two days later.

Brown was the Crown’s final witness. The defence did not call any witnesses.

Brown, who was 16 at the time, was not charged with any offence in connection with the gas theft and Rashidi’s death.

Closing arguments are now scheduled for Thursday. think we do. The goons are gone, largely. But the great players, like Sidney Crosby, are still targets, and without a Semenko-style deterrent lurking nearby to protect him, the Kid is left to protect himself.

He accomplishes this to great effect by hacking and hooking and spearing and chopping opponents with his stick, occasionally targeting them in ungentlemanly places, for example: the groin region of Buffalo’s Ryan O’Reilly.

Crosby also yaps and chirps, barks at the officials and plays every shift as though it may be his last. He is easy to hate, if you are a Washington fan, say, or a relative of Ryan O’Reilly’s, but he is even easier to love.

“Years ago, there was Bobby Clarke, and Bobby was as good — and as dirty as it came — but when it got too hot in the kitchen he had some guys that could handle it for him,” Coffey says. “The game is different now, and that is what makes the game so great. You don’t have to be 6-foot-3. You just have to play hard.”

You just have to play like the Kid, and that is something only he can do, and in losing him — we all lose — even the Crosby haters with their nonsense tweets.