Killer gets life for triple slaying at restaurant
Lawyer slams RCMP conduct
The lawyer for a man given a life sentence on Tuesday for his role in the gang-related triple homicide at Bolsa Restaurant on New Year’s Day 2009, blasted the RCMP for “egregious conduct” for failing to disclose a statement by a key witness that she says could have exonerated her client.
Tonii Roulston said after Real Christian Honorio was sentenced to life in prison with no parole for 25 years that Mounties withheld the statement taken from a witness identified in court only as M.M. at a traffic stop near Unity, Sask., two months before the first trial in the Bolsa case, in which M.M. claimed to be the killer of all three victims.
Roulston and co-counsel Andrea Urquhart earlier made an application for a mistrial or a stay of proceedings, based on the new evidence, but Court of Queen’s Bench Justice Glen Poelman denied the bid because he said he lacked jurisdiction to overturn a jury’s verdict.
“Unfortunately, Mr. Honorio will now have to seek his remedy at the Alberta Court of Appeal,” Roulston said. “This is a situation where police need to start being accountable for this conduct and, in this case, this is absolutely the most egregious conduct of the police not disclosing his statement and essentially covering it up. It is the RCMP, specifically, who ought to have disclosed it to Crown counsel.”
“But, in Canada, the Crown and police are one. So, they’re also held accountable for this. In fairness to the Crown, they did disclose it as soon as they obtained it. The only fault with the Calgary Police Service is that there ought to have been an independent investigation, not the Calgary Police Service investigating the RCMP and asking questions, and some of the pertinent questions that needed to be asked were not asked.”
Following the failed mistrial application, Poelman handed Honorio the mandatory sentence for first-degree murder in the shooting deaths of FK gang associate Aaron Bendle, 21, FK gang member Sanjeev Mann, 23, and life with no parole for 15 years for seconddegree murder in the shooting of bystander Keni S’ua, 43, who was gunned down in the parking lot as he ran from the Vietnamese eatery.
The undisclosed statement came to light last May when Crown prosecutors Rajbir Dhillon and Susan Karpa were advised of M.M.’s state- ments to RCMP Const. Eric MacDonald after M.M. was stopped for impaired driving July 11, 2011.
M.M. told McDonald repeatedly he was the lone shooter in the restaurant, what types of guns were used, who was shot and that he should be arrested for three counts of first-degree murder, but the officer seemed to shrug it off.
MacDonald said he and other RCMP officers found M.M. to be wavering between whether he was a witness for the Crown in the Bolsa case or actually the shooter, and believed he was trying to get out of the drunk driving charges.
“I felt that he was … mentally disturbed at the time,” MacDonald said.
The officer said M.M. went from saying he was a witness in the Bolsa case, to not knowing anything about it, to saying he was the killer.