Man accused of murder sent home to await trial
When Raul Huezo goes to sleep, a satellite high above Windsor keeps watch over his bed, via an electronic ankle bracelet linked to a Toronto security firm’s computer.
Whether awake or tucked in for the night, Huezo is under close surveillance around the clock. If he ventures out of his local home without a close family member, alarms go off and police are alerted.
Charged with first-degree murder in the brutal killing of a fellow young man in Windsor in 2018, Huezo must wear that security bracelet 24/7 until he goes on trial.
It’s part of what his lawyer describes as “very, very strict conditions” Huezo and his family agreed to so that he could leave jail this month after a year and a half in pretrial custody.
Huezo was arrested at a Windsor hotel by heavily armed members of the Windsor Police Service’s tactical team within days of Darrion
Moffatt being found shot in the head at a home in the 300 block of Hall Avenue on Sept. 8, 2018. Both victim and accused were aged 18 at the time, a profile that fit five of Windsor’s nine homicides that year in which teenagers were either the victim or the accused.
“He had to demonstrate to the court why he should be released,” said defence lawyer Frank Miller.
Someone has to be with him at all times, and a number of family members — from his mother and stepfather to an aunt and grandmother — signed on as sureties and posted a $50,000 bond promising to have Huezo abide by bail conditions set by a Windsor judge.
“Is he any danger to the community? No,” Miller said.
But letting the alleged killer of her son walk free pending his trial — which, due to COVID-19, might be as far away as 2022 — has only triggered fear and additional anxiety for Carolyn Crankshaw.
“I’m horrified that someone who’s been charged with first-degree murder is out on bail, more so that it’s someone who allegedly murdered my son,” Crankshaw told the Star Monday.
While the family had been informed by Victim’s Services that pretrial bail was a possibility for the accused killer, she said news that Huezo was being released on May 1 “sent me and the family on a tailspin, emotionally.
“It’s just scary — I feel sometimes I want to go into hiding,” said Crankshaw.
She admits those feelings might appear “irrational,” but she describes a life in turmoil since the second-oldest of her four children was killed and she was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.
In an email to the Star, Moffatt’s younger sister Brooklynn, 14, said the bail release of the man accused of killing her brother has left her “sad, angry and scared … I don’t get a lot of sleep.”
Mother’s Day on Sunday was particularly difficult for the family. Crankshaw said she and her children visited the cemetery and stood around Darrion’s grave, “and we talked about him.”
The COVID -19 pandemic — with some Canadian judges describing jails in their bail and sentencing rulings as “dangerous” places to be — was likely a factor in Huezo’s release, Miller said. He said the prosecution “didn’t consent” to the accused’s bail application but suggested that, even without the novel coronavirus, the judge would likely have approved bail. Miller described Huezo’s family as “very responsible, very respectable people,” and the sureties were vetted by the Crown.
Given COVID-19’S effect on trial scheduling in an already busy court system, Miller said there likely won’t be a preliminary hearing in the case until next year and the trial “could very easily” be delayed until 2022.
At the time of his September 2018 arrest, Windsor police announced that Huezo was also facing a charge in connection with another violent crime — the stabbing of a man in downtown Windsor a month earlier.
“You get bail on murder like anything else, but you don’t get bail when the Crown has a strong case,” said Miller, adding he did not want to “get into details.”
While on bail, he said, his client can’t use a cellphone, contact other people or consume drugs and alcohol.
Cody Kennedy, 19 at the time, was arrested on the day of the fatal shooting and also charged with first-degree murder. He was released on bail after three weeks in jail and then had his murder charge dropped in April 2019.
Crankshaw said Darrion’s friends told her after his killing that he was looking forward to surprising his mother with news he was returning to school to complete his Grade 12 education.
“He was going through a rough patch, and I think he wanted acceptance … he got it from the wrong people,” said Crankshaw.
Her son was “a really sweet, caring kid,” she said, who loved to sing and who “really got joy out of making other people laugh.”
“This is a very difficult thing for a family to have to go through,” she said of the years waiting for a trial, which “is going to be extremely traumatic.”