Detective tears up over gunned-down witness

TORONTO — Three years and 53 days ago, Toronto Police Det. Sgt. Royce Macdonald was sitting outside courtroom 4-9 at Toronto’s main courthouse, shepherding witnesses in and out of an attempted murder trial.

Thursday, he was there again — “This very courtroom,” as he said sorrowfully, shaking his head.

But this time, with one of the witnesses he’d babysat gunned down in the street, Macdonald was himself in the stand, giving evidence about that first trial and the young man at its centre.

The allegation now is that that witness, 30- year- old Kenneth Mark, was shot in the head precisely because in co-operating with Macdonald and his ilk and then testifying at the attempted murder trial, he’d broken the code of silence and written his own death sentence.

The chronology given to Ontario Superior Court Ian Nordheimer and a jury goes like this:

On Dec. 14, 2009, the attempted murder trial of Lamar (Ammo) Skeete and his brother began in 4-9.

The two were accused in the Sept. 2, 2008, shooting of Mark, wherein while sitting in the courtyard of the west-end housing project where he’d grown up, he had taken a shotgun blast to his face and body and was left with 57 pellets in his right cheek, neck, shoulder and back.

Before the trial proper started, prosecutors withdrew all charges against Skeete, saying there was no reasonable prospect of conviction, and he walked out of 4-9 a free man.

Later that day, Mark took the witness stand to testify that it was Skeete’s brother who had fired a shotgun at him, and that Skeete had been standing behind him when he did it.

On Dec. 15, 2009, Mark continued his testimony and was crossexamined by defence counsel.

On Dec. 17, 2009, Skeete’s brother was acquitted of all charges and walked out of court a free man.

On Dec. 29, 2009, Mark, a big gentle bear of a fellow, was a dead man walking to work at the Walmart near his house.

He’d just picked up food — he worked nights — at his favourite wings joint, and had his headphones on.

He was shot once in the back of the head at close range, and died almost instantly.

Clearly, having witnesses allegedly taken out — Skeete is pleading not guilty to first-degree murder — for giving evidence would be a bad thing for a justice system.

It may be that, and also Mark’s mellow personality and the fact that Macdonald obviously liked him, which caused the detective to break down a little as he described his first meeting with the young man.

With 22 years on the job, on some of the rough-and-readiest of squads, Macdonald is no ingenue.

Yet when prosecutor Mary Humphrey asked him to describe that first meeting, the detective’s eyes appeared to fill up. He turned his face away from the jurors. Humphrey asked to take the lunch break a few minutes early.

Macdonald described a meeting the police organized at the complex on Nov. 3, 2008.

It was in response to a spike in gun violence in the low-rise project on St. Clair Avenue West — there’d been the shooting of Mark, a second shooting on Oct. 16, and one of the residents had come to the police for assistance.

Macdonald told the small crowd that “unless we have community support and help, leads to go on, there’s not much we can do.”

By this, he told Humphrey, he meant that if police had no witnesses or people willing to talk, crimes would go unsolved.

As the meeting ended, and he and his partner were thanking people for coming, Mark came up and introduced himself.

“Do you know who I am?” he asked.

Macdonald, having seen the pictures of his injuries — the “tiny volcanoes” of swelling and blood from the pellets — recognized him.

“I know exactly who you are,” he said.

“He advised me he was the one who was shot, and said he’d like to come in and speak to us,” the detective said.

The next day, Mark came to the station and gave a sworn, videotaped statement in which he implicated Skeete and his brother in the shooting, and explained what the alleged motive might have been.

A week or so earlier, he said, he’d heard from the kids in the complex that the two were showing the local children, including his own nieces and nephews, a gun.

Thereafter, Mark told the detective, when he ran into Skeete’s brother, he “draped him up” — called him out on the gun display, told him to stay away from the complex.

Now, when police had first asked Mark who shot him, he’d denied knowing who it was. Then, he said, the brothers came looking for him at the complex, and that made him anxious and angry. When he testified at the preliminary hearing before Skeete and brother were committed for trial, he testified, “After they shot him, he feared for his life because he didn’t want to die.”

But as it appears Mark had been an honest witness — he admitted, for instance, it was “possible” it hadn’t been Skeete standing behind his brother that night, though he was pretty sure it was — so was Macdonald.

In cross-examination by defence lawyer Ferhan Javed, he admitted that Mark never told him he was afraid of Skeete and his brother, never once voiced concern about going to court.

The enormous young man — he stood six-foot-four and weighed about 300 pounds — was known as a quiet man. Was he too proud to tell Macdonald he was afraid?

The last time the detective saw him, Mark was in the victim/witness office at the University Ave. courthouse.

He had finished testifying, and was looking after the little boy of a friend who had followed him to the witness stand.

“She wasn’t comfortable leaving him with anyone but Kenneth,” Macdonald said.

“How was his demeanour?” Humphrey asked.

“To me, Kenneth’s demeanour doesn’t change. He’s a fairly wellspoken individual … the transcript doesn’t necessarily show that. I spent a lot of time with Kenneth. He’s very, very soft-spoken and you have to ask him to speak up.”

The detective seemed unaware he was using the present tense throughout.