Witnesses detail harrowing stories at gang trial
KELOWNA — Judith Jones briefly broke down in B.C. Supreme Court on Wednesday as she described coming face-to-face with a masked gunman outside the Delta Grand Hotel just before he finished off his target.
The 69-year-old had been at the neighbouring casino on the afternoon of Aug. 14, 2011 with her daughter and were driving out past the hotel.
“Just as she started to pull forward, we heard a bunch of bang sounds and I think I said, ‘Who the heck is letting off firecrackers on a Sunday afternoon?’ And then we realized there was shooting going on,” Jones told Justice Allan Betton at the trial of three men accused of killing gangster Jonathan Bacon.
“The shooter stopped and looked at us, and as he looked, he aimed his gun toward us. There was another shooter on the left who also looked at us.”
After the chilling encounter, the gunmen continued firing at a white car that crashed into a wall, she said.
One of the shooters walked up to the driver’s side and fired three more shots, Jones testified. The trial has already heard that Hells Angel Larry Amero was behind the wheel of the white Porsche Cayenne.
“(The other) shooter who was on the passenger side of the vehicle — there was a man on the ground between the wall and the car, and he shot him once,” she said.
The man was Bacon.
Jones said she watched the gunmen, dressed all in black, get into another SUV parked in the courtyard and take off from the scene.
Jones was one of four Kelowna residents who told their harrowing stories Wednesday at the trial of Jujhar Khun-Khun, Jason McBride and Michael Jones. All three are charged with the first-degree murder of the Red Scorpion gang leader, as well as the attempted murder of the four others in the Porsche — Amero, Independent Soldier James Riach, Leah Hadden-Watts and Lyndsey Black.
Dianne Hofer had been checking out paddleboards in a nearby store with a friend and his son when they got into their car about a block from the scene.
Driving toward the hotel, Hofer heard what she thought was the “sound of firecrackers going off.”
Hofer said her friend “seemed to get distressed, and said we need to turn around.”
“I looked ahead and saw what looked like fire coming out of the end of a gun,” Hofer said.
She noticed at least one gunman, and possibly two, shooting at a white SUV in the hotel’s entrance.
Her friend said they needed to turn around and get out of there.
“It was probably my worst U-turn ever . ... I was a bit frazzled at the time,” Hofer said.
She said she saw what looked like the suspects’ SUV racing past her car away from the shooting.
Her friend “commented that we should go back because there was shooting and people could be hurt.” So they did. Her friend began doing CPR on Bacon, while she stayed in her vehicle with her friend’s son.