Pair guilty of killing party guest: Crown
Tyrone Chambers and Joshua Warner are both guilty of killing Hamilton teenager Brandon Musgrave at a student party, regardless of who actually fired the shot, argues Crown prosecutor Tyler Shuster.
And the suggestion by Warner’s lawyer that his client was “a peacemaker” who tried to defuse tensions before he and Chambers started shooting at people is “absurd” and “obscene,” Shuster said Friday.
It was Musgrave, 18, whom trial witnesses called a peacemaker. They said Musgrave tried to calm a dispute Chambers started over his dislike of the music that was playing.
Chambers, 31 and Warner, 29, are charged with second-degree murder in Musgrave’s death and the aggravated assault of two other students seriously injured.
The jury has been told this is a second trial for Chambers and Warner after the result of their first trial was overturned on appeal.
Chambers has admitted taking a loaded handgun, hidden in a sock, to the March 12, 2010 party at 53 Dundurn St. S., and pointing it when the music was not to his liking and wasn’t changed. But he said he did not fire but Warner did.
Witnesses in the trial said both men fired guns.
Court also heard Musgrave, a guest at the party hosted by Columbia International College students, was shot in the head after advising the person whose music Chambers disliked not to go outside to settle it because it wasn’t worth it.
Kauner Chinambu, 18, was shot through his wrist into his chest. Ted Tsibu-Darkou, then 20, was shot in the shoulder.
On Friday, Shuster presented the Crown’s closing arguments in the trial that began in late October.
Chambers’ lawyer, Christopher Hicks, and Warner’s lawyer, Devin Bains, gave their closings earlier in the week. Both said the other’s client shot Musgrave.
Hicks argued Chambers didn’t fire. Bains argued Warner only shot Tsibu-Darkou and that he was a “peacemaker” for saving lives by not hiding his gun in a sock like Chambers, giving people a chance to run for cover — and for defusing tensions by refusing to give Chambers his iPod to change the music.
But Shuster told the jury “this ‘peacemaker’ pulls out his gun instantaneously when Mr. Chambers does. This is no peacemaker.”
Shuster said the two men acted together and are both guilty of murder and aggravated assault.
They started three trivial disputes within minutes of each other to bully people, he suggested. The last one ended with them trapping partygoers inside a room by blocking their exit and shooting, he said.
Shuster dismissed Hicks’ suggestion that Chambers drew his gun because he felt threatened, saying Warner and Chambers “pulled out their guns as another act of intimidation and bullying … the deadly shooting wasn’t about self-defence. It was about the power that loaded guns brought them.”
He said Chambers and Warner are “responsible for the consequences of shooting these three men. The uncertainty of who fired the shot is irrelevant … They knew in pointing those loaded firearms that a murder could happen. You can’t say, ‘Well, I didn’t shoot.’ That’s not a defence in Canada.”