Shooting victim evasive on stand
Brampton man hit by gunfire in 2015 unable to remember details at attempted murder trial
Shot at close range in a downtown alley after departing a nightclub, the victim initially refused to cooperate with police, and even at the trial of the alleged gunman, the victim still didn’t appear terribly helpful to the prosecution’s case. “How many times were you shot?” assistant Crown attorney Renee Puskas asked Phillip Nkrumah on Monday at the start of the attempted murder trial of Nicholas McCullough.
“I don’t remember,” Nkrumah said. Asked by Puskas to relate the events of that night, the victim replied: “I got shot and I ran.” McCullough faces 21 other counts in a trial before Superior Court Justice Gregory Verbeem expected to last three weeks. Most of the charges stemming from the Sept. 28, 2015, incident relate to the possession and the use of a prohibited firearm and to breaches of previous probation orders, but there’s also an aggravated-assault count to go with the most serious charge of attempted murder.
Nkrumah, now 33, couldn’t identify McCullough as the shooter and couldn’t remember who he was with that night. Asked how close the gunman was when three shots rang out, the victim said at first that it could have been 20 feet, or maybe 30 feet — or perhaps 10 feet. “I heard a bang, I felt the pain and I ran,” said the Brampton man who testified he was in Windsor to promote an upcoming concert at the Boom Boom Room. When asked, he couldn’t remember who the artist was he was here to promote. Nkrumah’s shooting was one in a string of such shootings in short order in Windsor and the downtown. The sudden uptick in local gunfire violence triggered public concerns and political pressure on the police, city hall and the business community to act.
The main issue in the trial underway is identification of who the shooter in the alley was that night. And while the victim might not be too helpful, the prosecution is relying heavily on technology for a conviction. The reliability of downtown Windsor’s growing array of surveillance cameras will be put to the test.
“This trial is going to be very video-intensive,” said Puskas, adding that five to seven days will be taken up in the viewing of surveillance video seized by police investigators. “It’s a complex case.”
The Crown concedes that none of the seized digital footage shows clearly the face of the shooter, but Puskas said all the surveillance evidence from multiple cameras from multiple locations scouring multiple angles will, once combined, point to McCullough’s guilt. The face might not be clearly seen on the video shown, but there’s a trail from one camera to the next — showing telltale details from “the way he points his toes or bends his arm” — all leading to the shooter. On Monday, digital evidence was introduced in the form of surveillance video taken from the Level 3 nightclub, whose main entrance is off Park Street, Royal Windsor Terrace condo apartment building at Park and Pelissier streets, and from the City of Windsor’s own on-street cameras.
It was one of the Royal Windsor Terrace cameras that captured the actual shooting, with two figures shown squaring off in an alley just off Park Street and one of them then buckling over before running off. Different cameras show Nkrumah, seconds later, sprinting up the stairs of Level 3, then sitting briefly at a table before collapsing onto the floor and being attended by nightclub staff, including having a tourniquet applied to his left thigh. Police at the time said the victim had been shot three times, but Nkrumah said on the stand he believes it was probably twice. More than a week after surgery, he said he was having a shower when a bullet dropped out of his leg, but he told the Crown he never kept it nor advised authorities about the discovery.
Puskas said evidence will show that the accused entered Level 3 — which, she said, has 14 video surveillance cameras — about an hour before the shooting. Nkrumah arrived at the club about 15 minutes before the shooting and left several minutes before the shots rang out. McCullough left with two others about a minute after Nkrumah and the trio entered the adjacent alley before two of them are shown exiting again. Three shots followed at about 12:55 a.m. Puskas said the Crown — and the cameras — will prove McCullough was the shooter. After getting into the witness box, Nkrumah was asked whether he had a criminal record. “Not as of yet,” said Nkrumah. He is currently under house arrest in the GTA and will be back in Windsor on Friday for sentencing before another Superior Court judge on a separate gun trafficking conviction. After the victim was rushed to hospital, police searched his car and discovered some cannabis and a bag containing “white powdery substance.”
Shown a photo of the latter and asked by Puskas to comment, Nkrumah replied: “It doesn’t look familiar.”
In addition to large video screens on two courtroom walls, the judge, Crown, defence and even the witness box all have their own desktop screens to view the surveillance camera evidence.