Drug dealer found guilty after teen fell 16 storeys
Ottawa crack dealer Liban Gure, 31, used to walk into the Elgin Street courthouse smiling.
He wasn’t smiling on Thursday when he was found guilty of manslaughter in the death of a vulnerable teen addict on May 15, 2017.
Ahmed Afrah, 18, was essentially chased to death, falling while trying to escape off the balcony of a public-housing unit at 415 MacLaren St.
He plunged 16 storeys to his death and landed on his left side.
His heart split in half on impact and he died immediately.
Afrah was summoned to the public-housing unit to settle a $400 drug debt with Gure. (The Ottawa public-housing apartment had been taken over and was being used as a crack house.)
Once inside, Afrah was beaten so loudly that tenants across the hall and one floor below could hear it over a basketball game on TV.
He was beaten in the bathroom, then in the front hall. It was a severe, prolonged beating in which Afrah was repeatedly hit and kicked, leaving the apartment spattered in blood. He begged for his life and screamed for help.
Superior Court Justice Robert Beaudoin ruled that Gure had beaten Afrah and caused his death.
“Manslaughter is a crime of consequences. The actions of Gure were significant contributing causes to Afrah’s death,” the judge told court Thursday.
Gure, the drug dealer in charge, triggered a chain of events that caused the teen’s death, the judge ruled.
Beaudoin noted the killer’s own words after the death: “Why did I let it get so far out of hand?”
Afrah was forced to sit on a kitchen chair as one of his attackers looked around for duct tape.
Fearing for his life, Afrah tried to escape off the 16th-floor balcony.
He climbed onto an adjacent balcony and tried to scale down to safety, but lost his grip, plunging 16 storeys to his death. Police found his fingerprints on the balcony.
Gure’s bail was revoked on Thursday a few hours after he was convicted of manslaughter. He is now in jail, awaiting sentencing.
The case against Gure was investigated by Ottawa police detectives Guy Seguin and Chris O’Brien, and handled by assistant Crown attorneys Lia Bramwell and Jon Fuller.
Daniel Jean-Charles, defended by Genevieve McInnes, was acquitted in the manslaughter case.
McInnes also won an acquittal on the aggravated assault charge against her client.
“The Crown has not satisfied its burden to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Jean-Charles was a party to any offence that night,” the judge said.
The judge noted that the case against Jean-Charles was fraught with credibility concerns.
The prosecution’s witnesses — mostly addicts — often contradicted themselves and in some cases admitted that they lied about what happened that night.