Accused claims he wanted help

A mentally ill man who is accused of killing two coworkers and wounding four others at a grocery warehouse says he attacked the men to get help.

Jayme Pasieka has pleaded not guilty to 10 charges including first-degree murder and attempted murder in the stabbings. He took the stand in his own defence Wednesday.

Pasieka, 32, testified before a jury in a calm, quiet voice that he had suffered a nervous breakdown and had given up on life when, armed with four knives, he walked into a Loblaws warehouse in Edmonton on Feb. 28, 2014.

“I didn’t know how to get the help that I needed,” he said. “I understood it was wrong.”

Under cross-examination by the Crown, Pasieka said he was angry at his co-workers, but made no distinction between them when he started randomly stabbing people.

“It was about stabbing someone and getting caught,” he said.

Crown prosecutor Kim Goddard asked Pasieka if he had a goal in mind when he walked into the warehouse. He was dressed in black and wore a military-style vest.

“You went there to kill people to get help?” she asked. “Yes,” he replied. Pasieka testified that he had been seeing and hearing things in his head for years, including the voice of the devil.

“I would like it to be treated very, very seriously because to put it in simple terms, I consider that driving requires 100 per cent of your attention,” Garneau told reporters before heading to Washington for a meeting with U.S. Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao.

The minister recently sent a letter to his provincial counterparts urging them to agree to tougher and uniform penalties for texting and talking on cellphones while driving.

“Having robust and nationally consistent enforcement measures and penalties will help mitigate the negative impact of this increasingly pervasive problem on Canada’s roads,” he said in the three-page letter dated Feb. 21.

While Garneau has yet to get a response from provinces, he says governments need to act more quickly to this growing issue than it did in the past to combat drunk driving.

“Canada was slow as a country to acknowledge and act on this problem, and it would be regrettable for us to make the same mistake again with driving while distracted,” he said.