Slain drug dealer feared for his life, jury told
Levy Kasende had embraced his future as a young father, but the crack dealer couldn’t escape his past, and on the other side of midnight on Aug. 25, 2012, it caught up to him in a drive-by shooting that left him dead outside a row house in Blackburn Hamlet.
“It is a sad and shocking story, but a simple one: Levy Kasende was shot through the heart,” prosecutor Matthew Geigen-Miller declared in his opening address Tuesday to the jury at Michael Belleus’s first-degree murder trial.
The Crown theory, adopted from the police investigation, is that Belleus, now 25, shot rival crack dealer Kasende, 22, out of revenge. (Kasende had shot Belleus in the arm on Canada Day in 2010 over a drug-turf feud, prosecutors said.)
At 1:45 a.m. on Aug. 25, 2012, Belleus pulled up to Kasende’s girlfriend’s row house on Innes Road. Kasenda was outside smoking when Belleus opened fire from the driver’s side window of a borrowed Mazda minivan, the jury heard. Kasende was shot in the right thigh, and in the back — the fatal shot.
The getaway van was found burning on Rockdale Road near Highway 417 in the city’s east end shortly after the killing. Belleus then left town for Montreal, the jury heard.
Belleus was bent on revenge for two years and had offered $2,000 to anyone who could tell him where he could find Kasende.
On the night he died, Kasende wouldn’t have been hard to find. That’s because his girlfriend, the mother of his child, had just moved into Belleus’s territory, out on Innes Road, just a few doors down from an associate of the accused killer.
In haunting words recalled in court by the prosecutor, Kasende himself told friends: “This neighbourhood is going to be the death of me.”
Kasende knew the east-end streets well and knew Belleus was after him. In fact, when he went to visit his girlfriend and child on the night of Aug. 24, he brought a sawed-off shotgun, the one he tucked under her bed, Geigen-Miller told the jury.
The jury — four women, eight men — heard that the Ottawa police case, led by Sgt. Darren Vinet and Det. Chris Benson, is anchored in eyewitnesses, surveillance and authorized wiretaps.
The prosecution’s case is also anchored in a voice from the grave. Before dying of cancer, one of the accused killer’s crack customers came forward to police and said he wanted to finally tell the truth.
He loaned Belleus his minivan, the one found engulfed in flames after the killing, he confessed. He originally told detectives he didn’t know anything about it and may have lost the keys to his minivan, Geigen-Miller told the jury.
Belleus’s customer wanted to tell the truth back in 2012 but was too afraid, Geigen-Miller said.
The customer only knew his dealer by his street name, but he identified him after reviewing police mug shots, the prosecutor told the jury. He also told police that he had loaned his minivan to Belleus in the past, usually in exchange for drugs or money.
In detailing the revenge motive, the prosecutor told the jury that in 2010, Belleus was irate and refused to co-operate with police, and told Sgt. Shane Henderson that he’d deal with it himself. He also told police to stop bothering his family after they came knocking.
Belleus has pleaded not guilty and is represented by Neil Weinstein and Anne London-Weinstein.