Victim was ‘targeted,’ witness tells murder trial

She spoke barely above a whisper, but on Tuesday a witness in the Shawn Douglas murder trial initially said the three defendants left a house on the 1600 block of Toronto Street with the journeyman pipefitter, 54, before he was killed. As the day neared a close, however, she seemed to change her mind.

The witness, now 19, who cannot be named because of a court order, said she lived at the home on the night Douglas died — Aug. 7, 2014 — and described it as a “trap house,” or “a house you sell drugs out of, I guess.”

Johnathon Nelson Peepeetch and Joshua Duane Wilson — both 26 — and Dennis Calvin Thompson, 35, are accused of first-degree murder, with the Crown saying Douglas was killed after he left a Triple 8 pizza restaurant on Victoria Avenue with a woman he knew, and others.

Douglas went with the group to the Toronto Street home and was later beaten, forced to go to an ATM so his assailants could take his cash, and then put in the trunk of a car and driven to an area east of Zehner where he was set upon with “with hammers and other tools,” the Crown told the jury last week.

The witness said the night was hazy as she had been drinking hard liquor, smoked marijuana and “probably” taken some cocaine. She said she was part of a group drinking at the Toronto Street house from afternoon into evening, and who then went to Triple 8 to collect liquor later that night.

She said that in the 15 or 20 minutes her group was at the Triple 8, they met a woman whom she did not know, and a man she later came to know as Shawn. She said the woman came to the window of the car the witness was in, then the group drove back to the house, and she (the unknown woman) “showed up at the house with some older dude.”

“I guess they were hanging out,” she added, saying the man’s hair was “greyish.” “He was white. He looked old,” she said.

At the house, the man became the target of men who had gathered there.

“He got marked in,” the witness said. “Targeted, I guess. He (Shawn) was trying to find blow, cocaine.

“I guess like scammed, or something, or like ripped off,” she said when asked to explain, “marked in.”

He wasn’t trying to fight. … His whole demeanour was scared. It was written all over his face.

“People were telling him to just, like, give up his shit,” she said, adding the man was sitting on a loveseat in the living room. The witness said, “somebody punched him around a little bit,” and that at one point, she took pity on the man she knew as Shawn.

“Sorry for what’s happening,” she recalled saying to him, adding that she told the man, who was bleeding, to co-operate with “the boys.”

“He wasn’t trying to fight,” she said. “He was basically just sitting there saying he wasn’t going to go to the cops. His whole demeanour was scared. It was written all over his face.”