Gasps, sobs fill courtroom during testimony
Calgary man on trial for murder after both youngster and her mother killed
Family of Taliyah Marsman gasped and sobbed Wednesday as a witness described seeing a little girl being transferred from one car to another near her slain mother’s home.
“Were you able to form an impression of the young girl?” Crown prosecutor Carla MacPhail asked northwest Calgary resident Douglas Jesson.
“She had been crying,” Jesson said, causing the emotional outburst from Taliyah’s relatives.
Jesson was testifying at the double-murder trial of Calgarian Edward Downey in the July 2016 deaths of five-year-old Taliyah and her mother, Sara Baillie.
It’s the Crown’s theory that Downey murdered the mother in her Panamount Boulevard N.W. home and then took Taliyah with him, later killing her as well.
Both victims died of asphyxiation, MacPhail said in her opening address Monday, with a pathologist determining that Baillie suffered both neck compressions and smothering, while the girl’s manner of death wasn’t clear.
Jesson and his wife, Sharry, were home in their Pantego Close N.W. residence on July 11 when they saw a white car pull into their cul-desac, just blocks from Baillie’s basement suite.
Jesson said the vehicle — a white Ford Focus, the same kind of car owned by Baillie — pulled up beside the fence adjacent to their property.
“I saw a gentleman take a young girl out of a car, take her across the
He took her out of the car, he got a suitcase and took her to another car across the boulevard.
road to another car,” he said.
“He took her out of the car, he got a suitcase and took her to another car across the boulevard.”
Jesson said the girl was walking on her own.
“She was walking ahead of him,” he said.
“He opened the back door and put her in and put the suitcase in.”
He said the second car had tinted windows, similar to the vehicle being driven by Downey that day.
Sharry Jesson said she watched the incident before seeing the man and child drive away “fairly fast.” Both described the man as black. The trial of Downey, who is black, is ongoing.