Crown makes final case

EATON CENTRE SHOOTER KNEW WHAT HE WAS DOING: CROWN

A man who killed two people and injured several others when he opened fire at Toronto’s Eaton Centre may have suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, but prosecutors said Monday that doesn’t mean he had no control over his actions.

Crown lawyers said the psychiatric experts who assessed Christopher Husbands agreed he had PTSD but were split on whether he could have been in a dissociative state when he fired 14 bullets in the downtown mall’s crowded food court on June 2, 2012.

In his closing submissions, Crown lawyer John Cisorio said one of the doctors noted that the act of aiming and firing a gun is more complex than what you would expect from someone experiencing dissociation.

Cisorio showed jurors stills from security video that shows Husbands holding a gun with his arms shoulder height, then at a 45-degree angle, then again higher up.

“This was not someone blindly shooting. This was someone who was purposely aiming — he knew exactly what he was doing,” the lawyer told jurors.

After the shooting, Husbands ran from the food court and left the mall, Cisorio said.

“He was aware and conscious of the fact that he did what he did and he had to get away,” he said.

Defence lawyers told the court Friday that Husbands was in a dissociative state as a result of his PTSD.