Witness recalls events that led to fatal stabbing
Woman tells court she provoked fight with rude remark to passing stranger
A Saskatoon murder trial heard from a woman who was with Lajray Orlando Redman Gordon when he got into a street fight that turned deadly.
Coquilynn Frenchman said she didn’t know exactly what happened between Gordon and the other man, who she learned was David Merasty, but she could tell Merasty was hurt when he asked her for help.
Merasty, 24, died in hospital after he was stabbed in the 300 block of Avenue E South, just off 20th Street, on June 18, 2016. Gordon was charged with second-degree murder and is on trial this week at Saskatoon Court of Queen’s Bench.
“I’ve never seen anything like it before,” Frenchman testified on Tuesday. She said she blames herself for starting the fight between the two strangers.
Frenchman said she, Gordon and a friend were coming from the Friendship Inn when they encountered Merasty. She asked him for a cigarette and made a rude comment that prompted Merasty to follow her group into a yard, court heard.
Gordon stepped in and Merasty made a racist comment to him, Frenchman testified. She said she’s not sure how or when Merasty was injured, because she looked away when she feared Gordon and Merasty were going to fight.
“I was too busy being high and trying to be tough,” she said, wiping away tears.
The jury heard Frenchman and Gordon were acquaintances who smoked methamphetamine together earlier that day.
WITNESSES SAW MAN “SWING” AT VICTIM
Aaron Caswell said the fight happened in front of his house. He testified that an Indigenous man, who he later learned was Merasty, took a swing at a black man before the black man made a slashing motion toward Merasty.
Caswell said he never actually saw a knife. The jury heard a knife was never recovered.
Lyle Lecomte was working on a house across the street and a few doors down from Caswell’s home. He said he saw a man wearing black swing “two or three times” at a man wearing white in what he described as a “stabbing motion.”
The man in white collapsed and the man in black ran down an alley, Lecomte testified.
Under cross-examination, Lecomte agreed that he initially told police his eyesight “wasn’t the greatest” and that all he could see were two figures and the colours they were wearing.