Trial opens in home invasion killing
Man shot to death in 2012
It was a snowy November night when three men, armed and masked, burst into a townhouse looking to rob it, a jury heard at the start of the Noel Francis murder trial.
One man pointed a gun at the head of a terrified mother as she cowered on a downstairs sofa, holding a two-year-old child in her lap.
Two other men ran upstairs just as Devane Campbell, 20, leapt from a second-floor balcony into the snowy backyard below.
Campbell was visiting his girlfriend at the Kitchener townhouse. It was Friday about 11:30 p.m. The couple had just watched a movie.
In his socks, Campbell ran from the backyard all the way around to the front of the townhouse before rushing back in through the front door and up the stairs.
That’s when he was shot in the neck and in the back. The bullets were fired from the second floor.
Jurors saw photographs of carnage inside the townhouse; bullet holes, spent cartridges, and a blood-spattered stairwell.
“Devane Campbell was killed in the midst of a home invasion robbery,” prosecutor Nicole Redgate said Monday in her opening statement, providing a road map to the jury of what she intends to prove.
Following a trail of blood and snowy footprints, police soon found Campbell in the backyard of a nearby townhouse. He was lying face down beside a barbecue and a child’s swing set, lightly dressed in a white T-shirt and jeans, wearing no shoes, carrying a folding knife and a stun gun.
“Show me your hands!” Const. Michael McKay yelled upon finding him in the snow just before midnight. Called to a chaotic scene, police didn’t know yet what they were dealing with.
There was no response. Campbell was dead. It was the shot to the neck that killed him.
Francis, 30, of Toronto has pleaded not guilty to murdering Campbell, who lived in Brantford. It happened almost five years ago on Nov. 30, 2012, at a housing complex at 199 Elm Ridge Dr.
Redgate said she intends to prove that Francis rushed back to Toronto after the murder to the home of a good friend. He handed his friend a cloth bag, saying he had shot someone. The bag held the gun used to kill Campbell. Toronto police obtained the gun within hours.
Francis had asked his friend to join him in the Kitchener robbery, Redgate said. The friend refused because that was the same night he proposed to his girlfriend over dinner at a Red Lobster restaurant. That
friend is now facing a weapons charge for handling the murder weapon.
Francis was not arrested until 2015, nearly three years after Campbell died. He appeared in court Monday in a suit jacket wearing glasses, braided hair and a goatee. His parents and two nieces were in the courtroom to watch.
Jurors, eight women and six men, heard evidence from two Waterloo Regional Police officers who walked them through the crime scene inside and outside the townhouse. The trial continues Tuesday.