Suspect told of shooting details, witness testifies
Inmate incarcerated with man says they communicated with notes, by talking
Mitchell Sasakamoose remembers thinking the crime he heard described by a fellow Saskatchewan Penitentiary inmate was a “s----y move, a chickens--- move.”
The inmate, Brandin Cole Brick, at one point occupied a cell in the same range of the institution’s maximum security wing. He was there in connection with the death of 28-year-old James Chaisson in the early morning of Feb. 14, 2018.
Brick, now 28, is also accused of kidnapping with the intent to confine Chaisson against his will, possessing a firearm while prohibited, possessing a loaded prohibited firearm and breaching conditions.
During Brick’s first-degree murder trial on Friday, Sasakamoose testified that Brick was already known to him from his time out in the community. They communicated by talking through the windows of their cell doors and sliding notes under the door when one of them was out in the hallway, he said.
In their conversations and a twopage letter he recalled seeing Brick slip under his door, Sasakamoose said Brick told him something about a man in Saskatoon who had been shot earlier in the year with a sawed-off .22.
The man “got shot from the front seat to the back because he was in a car, because he was a gang member in another gang, I guess,” Sasakamoose said.
Sasakamoose wrote notes about the letter and then threw it out, but it was eventually retrieved by guards. Both the letter and his notes were entered as exhibits in court on Friday.
INVOLVED WITH GANGS
Court heard earlier this week that the two men were involved with local gangs that were longtime rivals — Brick with the Terror Squad and Chaisson with the Saskatchewan Warriors.
Witness Nathan Pelly testified on Tuesday that Brick had driven him, a man named JD and a woman whose name he didn’t know to a now-closed convenience store on 22nd Street, where the group ran into Chaisson.
After getting back into the car, Pelly said, Brick threatened Chaisson into getting in, drove for a bit and then turned around and shot him. Sasakamoose said Brick told him the unnamed woman “lured”
Chaisson into the vehicle by offering him a ride.
During cross-examination, Brick’s lawyer, Patrick Mcdougall, questioned how Brick was able to slide the letter under the door or talk to Sasakamoose in his cell with guards present.
He noted Sasakamoose’s testimony contradicted statements he gave during a preliminary hearing, when he said he didn’t know where the note had come from. Mcdougall suggested Sasakamoose was the one who wrote the letter.
“I’m going to suggest to you that everything that you wrote down in these two notes was public knowledge before Mr. Brick was even there,” Mcdougall said.
Sasakamoose admitted his testimony in that regard had changed, but said it was because at the time of the preliminary hearing he was going back to prison and was concerned about potentially being pressured or assaulted.
“People hear about it,” he said. “Now I’m out of it, it doesn’t concern me, I’m out in the community, not in prison.”
The judge-only trial is expected to continue next week.