Woman tells trial she heard ‘seven or eight’ shots
Mission resident Tami Bullock testified in B.C. Supreme Court Wednesday about hearing several bangs on the street outside her home more than a decade ago.
Bullock told jurors at the trial of alleged drug trafficker Jamie Bacon that she was concerned enough about the “seven or eight” bangs that she called 911 that night.
Bacon is charged with counselling someone to commit a murder over several months in late 2008.
Crown prosecutor Joe Bellows said in his opening submissions Feb. 4 that Bacon wanted his associate Dennis Karbovanec dead because Karbovanec was using drugs and not focusing on their illicit business.
He said Bacon recruited another associate, who can be identified only as CD because of a publication ban, to kill Karbovanec on New Year’s Eve 2008.
Bullock testified before Justice Catherine Wedge that she stayed home with her husband on Dec. 31, 2008, and was watching TV when she heard the bangs.
She said there was a grouping of four or five bangs that got her attention, followed by another two or three after “maybe a couple of minutes.”
“I got up and looked out my kitchen window,” she said, adding that she saw two red tail lights from a car heading west on the street.
Bullock said she lived at the end of Bench Avenue, where the shooting is alleged to have taken place.
According to an admission read in court Wednesday, Bullock called police about 10:20 p.m. that night.
She testified that she contacted police again in mid-January 2009 after her neighbour came to her door and handed her some bullets and shell casings.
The Crown has said that the neighbour was out walking with her young child, when the toddler found some metal cylinders on a trail off Bench Avenue in January 2009.
The objects were both spent shell casings and live rounds, Bellows said on the opening day of the trial.
Bullock said her neighbour knocked on her door and said “I have something for you.”
“So I opened my hands and she dropped some casings and some bullets into my hands,” Bullock said.
She testified that she couldn’t remember the exact number of items the neighbour handed to her because so much time has passed.
“I took them into my house and called the police. I put them on my counter and waited for the police to pick them up,” she said.
Bellows said that witnesses would testify about several key areas in Mission linked to the shooting — the cul-de-sac on Bench Avenue, another deadend street called Swift Avenue and Mission Rotary Sports Park where Karbovanec, CD and others allegedly met that night under the pretence of robbing a drug-house. CD is expected to testify later in the trial, as is another former Bacon associate who can be identified only as AB.
Both will allege Bacon directed them to kill Karbovanec and helped lure him out to a meeting that night.
The trial at the Vancouver Law Courts is expected to last at least 10 weeks.