Knife fight witness says victim was the aggressor

Accused friend’s testimony at odds with other accounts of parking lot stabbing

A friend of Alvin Patrick Junior Naistus, the man accused of fatally stabbing Billy Johnston in the parking lot of the Northwoods Inn, says he saw Naistus and another man yelling and swinging knives at each other as they emerged from a motel room.

Naistus kept backing away as the other man tried to attack him, Kajtim Ali testified Wednesday during Naistus’s second-degree murder trial in Saskatoon Court of Queen’s Bench.

Ali said he lost sight of the men as they rounded the side of the motel. The next thing he saw was Naistus and his girlfriend running toward him and his car, he told court.

Naistus had a knife and mentioned stabbing someone, Ali told the jury. He said Naistus threatened to stab him and take his keys if he didn’t let him in the car.

Ali said he heard the car’s back window roll down as he zigzagged through a residential neighbourhood, but he didn’t see if Naistus tossed the knife out.

During cross-examination by the defence, Ali said the bald man involved in the altercation with Naistus was the aggressor. He said he did not see Naistus bothering anybody that night.

Other witnesses testified Johnston was the one being chased. A cellphone video played for the jury Monday shows two men facing off outside the motel. One chases the other around the corner of the building, lunging at him and running away after the man falls to the ground. The woman who took the video told court the man who fell was Johnston. She didn’t know who the other man was, she said.

The Crown showed the video to Ali, who confirmed he saw what was on the video with his own eyes.

Police found Johnston, 44, bleeding in the parking lot close to Idylwyld Drive around 6:30 a.m. on April 18, 2015. The jury heard he died from a stab wound to the chest.

Around noon that day, Reilly Forbes was leaving a home on 29th Street West, just three blocks north of the motel, when an elderly woman passing by pointed out a dagger near a tree. She picked it up and gave it to him to take inside, he testified. Forbes said he called police as soon as he realized there was blood on the knife. He found the sheath nearby, which he picked up with a bag, and took the items to the police station, he said.

The only fingerprint suitable for testing was on the knife’s handle and belonged to Forbes, according to testimony from forensic identification officers.