Shooting that left Indigenous man dead just a freak accident, says defence.
Sask. farmer believed gun had no bullets
BATTLE FORD• Testifying on his own behalf, Saskatchewan farmer Gerald Stanley told a jury his gun had a delayed discharge on the day Colten Boushie was fatally shot on his property.
Stanley, 56, broke his 18-month silence Monday at Battleford’s Court of Queen’s Bench during the second week of his second- degree murder trial.
He told the jury that a loud vehicle sped onto his farm on Aug. 9, 2016, and that someone from the vehicle hopped onto one of his quad ATVs.
Stanley said he and his 28- year- old son, who had been building a fence on the property, ran toward the vehicle.
He said the person on the quad got back into the loud vehicle, his son smashed the vehicle windshield with a hammer and the vehicle sped away down the driveway spewing gravel.
“I’m thinking ‘ Wow, that was pretty exciting, there they go.’ I thought they were just going to continue moving up the road,” Stanley said.
But then the vehicle turned and struck one of Stanley’s vehicles.
“I’m thinking: They’re not leaving and what is happening?” Stanley said.
At that point, Stanley said his son started running toward the house and the vehicle. Stanley said he thought his son was going to confront the vehicle and wanted to help him. Stanley said he walked into his shed and grabbed his Tokarev semiautomatic pistol, which he used to scare coyotes, and peeled what he believed to be two bullets off a strip and put them in a magazine.
Stanley said he left the shed, and couldn’t see his son. He said he fired a warning shot straight in the air and two men who had exited the loud vehicle turned to look at him.
Stanley said he raised the gun a second time and pulled the trigger “two or three times.” He said the two men from the vehicle started running down the driveway. Stanley said he never pointed the gun at the vehicle or the people in it.
Stanley said he brought the gun down and popped the clip out of the magazine. His gun was in his right hand and the magazine was in his left.
“As far as I was concerned, it was empty, I’d fired the last shot,” Stanley said. “The slide was back and the barrel was expended out the end and the magazine was out.”
Stanley said he continued to walk toward the vehicle and then realized that the l awnmower his wife had been on was unmanned. He said he felt “pure terror.”
“I thought the car had ran over my wife,” Stanley testified.
He said he ran to the vehicle, planning to look under it to make sure his wife wasn’t there. As he approached, the vehicle revved up.
“I thought the car was going to run me over,” Stanley said.
He said he noticed the driver of the vehicle for the first time and saw “something metal” sticking out of the window toward him. He said he banged the metal object with his left hand as he reached for the keys and that his right hand was somewhere in the vehicle.
“I was reaching in across the steering wheel to turn the keys off and boom, the thing just went off,” Stanley told the jury.
“I couldn’t believe what just happened and everything seemed to just go silent.”
Earlier Monday, Scott Spencer, Stanley’s defence lawyer, described Boushie’s death as “a freak accident that occurred in the course of an unimaginably scary situation one afternoon.”
Spencer asked the jury to consider what they would do if intruders came into their homes to steal and damage their property.
The jury heard last week that hang fires — a delay between pulling the trigger and bullet firing — are very rare and last less than a second.
But on Monday, Spencer called two witnesses who said they had experienced hang fires that lasted several seconds.
A defence expert said last week that hang fires may be more likely with ammunition that is older or has been improperly stored.
Stanley told the court Friday that he bought surplus ammunition for his Tokarev because it was cheaper and that he stored the ammunition in a shed that wasn’t heated.
He said that in every box of 40 bullets he would normally find one “dud.”
Stanley’s trial is scheduled to go until Feb. 15, but Chief Justice Martel Popescul told the jury last week that it could end earlier.