Drug dealer tells court Crown witnesses lied about his role in murder

Bronson Gordon told a Regina jury that Crown witnesses lied about his alleged involvement in the confinement and killing of Reno Lee.

“He’s lying, he’s really lying,” Gordon said of one witness who testified Gordon armed him with a gun to confront and confine Lee.

But Gordon admitted to having lied numerous times himself in the course of two videotaped statements he provided to police in the month after Lee’s death.

Gordon began his testimony on Wednesday fielding questions from his lawyer Marianna Jasper before facing cross-examination on Thursday and Friday by the Crown and lawyers representing his two co-accused, Andrew Bellegarde and Daniel Theodore.

Gordon, 33, Bellegarde, 24, and Theodore, 34, are standing trial on charges of first-degree murder and offering an indignity to human remains. The charges relate to a string of events that occurred on April 16, 2015, the date 34-year-old Lee was allegedly killed.

The jury has heard that Lee was held at gunpoint in Gordon’s Angus Street apartment before being taken to a house on Garnet Street, where he was bound and eventually shot twice in the head. Court heard his dismembered and decapitated body was found later that month.

Gordon’s role in the night’s events has been the subject of his testimony, which entered the third day with intense cross-examination by Crown prosecutor Adam Breker.

Gordon maintained he knew nothing about what was to transpire, telling the jury his intention in meeting with Lee was for the two drug dealers to talk business.

Breker suggested Gordon was well aware there was to be more to that meeting. Breker pointed to previous testimony from Gordon that he’d been confronted over his own drug debt by a “Mexican” identified only as Romeo, who threatened Gordon.

Gordon said Theodore — often referred to by the name Buddha — was brought on board to manage that debt.

Breker suggested to Gordon his experience with Romeo meant he knew far more about the fate awaiting Lee than he was letting on, pointing to portions of Gordon’s videotaped police statements from May 15-16, 2015, in which he said what happened to the heavily indebted Lee “was supposed to happen to me.”

Gordon told the court he lied during those interviews, claimed police coached him, and said he was high on crystal meth.

Lawyers for Bellegarde and Theodore said evidence is not being called in their clients’ cases.

The jury returns on Wednesday for closing addresses by counsel.