Dead in 50 seconds, but murder trial moves in slow motion

As Napoleon once told an aide, “Go, sir, gallop, and don’t forget the world was made in six days. You can ask me for anything you like, except time.”

The little general wasn’t talking about cops, but he could have been.

Oh, it was a punishing tide of video and audio evidence that came in and rolled over the jurors this week at the criminal trial of one such, Toronto police Const. James Forcillo.

The 32-year-old officer is pleading not guilty to seconddegree murder and attempted murder in the streetcar shooting death of Sammy Yatim in the summer of 2013.

As is increasingly the case with modern stories, the shooting was captured on a variety of video cameras, all of which show the shooting of the 18-year-old, brandishing a switchblade, at the front of an empty Dundas Street streetcar.

The shooting happened, as such events tend to do for those on the front lines, with shocking, terrifying speed: From the time Forcillo and his partner arrived on the scene until the time he fired the first volley of three shots, including what turned out to be the fatal one to Yatim’s heart, less than 50 seconds had passed.

He fired a second volley of six shots about five-and-a-half seconds later.

The video shows that after briefly holstering his weapon and moving closer to the open streetcar doors where Yatim was lying inside the doors, in the shattering adrenalin overload aftermath, Forcillo got his gun out again and appeared ready to let loose a third volley. It’s nothing like that at trial. There, on Wednesday, amid the usual extended breaks for snacks and lunch, jurors watched on screens four 17-minute silent videos from cameras inside the downtown streetcar that night.

Thursday came two civilian-shot iPhone videos, each about two minutes long; seven minutes of store security video shot by a camera on the side of a nearby building; a fiveminute audio recording from Toronto Transit Commission dispatch; a four-minute audio recording from Toronto Police dispatch and six polished synchronized videos that put together various excerpts of video with various audio tapes and were made by a local movie studio.

There were close-ups blown up 400 per cent, others blown up 125 per cent; there was a “motion-stabilized” version and a slow-motion one and even a version or two with subtitles, like a foreign film, the written dialogue appearing on screen.

And the initial monologue from Yatim, who had chased off all the passengers by swinging his knife at a young woman and then parading up the aisle with his penis in his left hand and the knife in the other, was little short of crazed.

“Get the f--- out of here, all of you,” he yelled, knife in hand, to the escapees. “F--- those bitch niggas.” Then, “You’re off. Run. Don’t walk. You’re f---ing niggas.”

Then he asked the streetcar driver if he had a phone and said he’d like to call his dad, and muttered, “There’s something going on. I don’t know what the f--- it is.”

Curiously, Yatim even showed a flash of humour. By now, he had an unlit cigarette in his mouth, and joked, of the habit that is always on a list of great Canadian sins, “Hey, no smoking in the car. Smoking’s … (inaudible). They know everything, no? They know everything.”

When Forcillo and his partner arrived, the first officers to get there, Forcillo immediately began screaming, “Drop the knife! Drop the knife!” At the front of the streetcar, spotting them through the front windows, Yatim lifted his hands in the air in the universal gesture of surrender, as if the switchblade wasn’t in the right one. “No,” said Yatim. “Drop the f---ing knife!” Forcillo shrieked. ‘No,” said Yatim. “Drop it!” “Nigga, nigga,” said Yatim. “Drop the knife!” said Forcillo. “No pussy,” Yatim replied. “You’re a pussy.”

On and on it went like this, until Constable Iris Fleckeisen, Forcillo’s partner, asked Yatim, “Are you the only one on?” meaning on the streetcar, to which Yatim replied, “Everyone is a pussy.”

It was a stunning reminder of all the police didn’t know, in that moment.

By now officers were flooding the scene, and a male chorus was yelling repeatedly, “Drop the knife. Drop the knife.”

Yatim moved away from the front, by the first seats on the right-hand side of the car. Forcillo yelled then, “You take one step in this direction and (inaudible) shoot you, I’m telling you right now!”

Another male officer shouted, “Don’t move!”, then, “Drop that knife!”

Sammy Yatim took two steps forward, right leg first, then left. He wasn’t running. He wasn’t lunging. But he moved forward.

At 12.00.51 a.m. on that July 27, Forcillo fired the first shot of the initial three. At 12.01.02, he fired the last of the second volley of six.

The jurors spent part of one day and all of another watching the videos. In the course of the viewing over two days, they had two extended coffee breaks and a 90-minute lunch.

It is the slow-mo, motion-stabilized, zoom-in-close way of the criminal trial, and it bears virtually no resemblance to James Forcillo’s world that awful night.

The trial resumes Monday.