Student died in arms of Good Samaritan
He was trying to figure out if I was a good person or not … I feel like he was scared. I tried to talk to him and comfort him.
Solomon Odekunle was just trying to make his way home the night of Nov. 6, 2016, and was waiting for a cab outside an east-end bar when Joe-Bryan Ndikuriyo “charged” out the doors and plunged a broken beer bottle into his neck, prosecutors alleged at the opening of Ndikuriyo’s murder trial.
Ndikuriyo, 29, has pleaded not guilty to second-degree murder in the killing of Odekunle, a 21-yearold international economics student from Nigeria who was attending the University of Ottawa at the time he was killed.
Ndikuriyo also pleaded not guilty to attempted murder after he turned on one of Odekunle’s friends and slashed him across the face and head with the same jagged bottle, according to the Crown’s timeline of the case.
Odekunle’s family members were emotional in court Tuesday as Crown prosecutors Mike Boyce and Hart Shouldice led the jury through their case against Ndikuriyo, who remained silent in the prisoner’s box.
He is represented at trial by defence lawyer Oliver Abergel.
Court heard Odekunle and his two friends and roommates headed to Piper’s Bar and Grill at the intersection of St-Laurent Boulevard and Ogilvie Road to drink and dance late on the night of Nov. 5, 2016.
The bar has since closed. Odekunle and Ndikuriyo were strangers, but they “briefly interacted” and at one point the two stepped outside the bar together. When Odekunle returned inside, he told his friends he wanted to go home.
It was nearing 2 a.m. and he had a midterm exam coming up that week, he told his friends.
Before they left the bar, Ndikuriyo came up and slung his arms over their shoulders.
“Are we cool?” Odekunle asked him and Ndikuriyo replied, “We’re cool, we’re good,” prosecutors said.
They all went outside and Ndikuriyo shared a joint with one of Odekunle’s friends.
“So there appeared to be no issue between the groups,” Shouldice said, but that would soon change.
Ndikuriyo’s girlfriend stepped outside and began “bickering” in an escalating argument with one of Odekunle’s friends. She tried to splash the man with her drink, but his other friend intervened and grabbed the glass.
Odekunle had no part in the exchange, Shouldice said, and was instead facing away from the altercation, anxiously waiting for a taxi to arrive.
It was at that point Ndikuriyo stormed out of the bar with a broken bottle of Heineken in his hand and stabbed Odekunle once in the neck, severing both his jugular vein and carotid artery.
Ndikuriyo then turned to Odekunle’s friend Garworh Myers, slashing him across the face with the jagged glass, then stabbing him in the back of the head as Myers fought back with his fists and the beer bottle he was holding.
Odekunle staggered across the street, where he would collapse on a concrete median on Coventry Road, and was pronounced dead in hospital an hour later.
Katherine Bray, 29, was stopped at a red light in the passenger seat of her boyfriend’s car as the two headed to Perkins Restaurant, a popular all-night diner directly across the street, when she saw a fist fight breaking out in front of the bar.
She noticed two people running across the street headed toward Coventry Road. She did not know at the time one of those men had been mortally wounded.
As the light turned green and they continued along Coventry Road, Bray saw the man lying on the median and told her boyfriend to stop the car.
“There was blood everywhere and he was being shaken by the man in the black coat,” she said during testimony as the Crown’s first witness.
“I checked his pulse and that’s when he moved and a gush of blood came out. He was trying to figure out if I was a good person or not … I feel like he was scared. I tried to talk to him and comfort him … He put his hand on my arm and he held me, so I understood that he understood that everything was good.”
Police and paramedics soon arrived and took over, Bray said.
Odekunle was rushed to the Civic campus of The Ottawa Hospital, where he lost vital signs and was pronounced dead about an hour after the first 911 calls were made.
Investigators followed two trails of blood — one that led to Odekunle on Coventry Road and another that led in the opposite direction through a vacant parking lot along St. Laurent Boulevard.
Those drops of blood would later prove to be a match with Ndikuriyo’s DNA, the Crown said.
Ndikuriyo then made his way to a friend’s house on Carsons Road where, according to prosecutors, he changed and washed his clothes. Forensic investigators would later find those clothes were stained with the blood of Ndikuriyo, Myers and Odekunle, the Crown alleged.
Major crime detectives began their search for a suspect “by literally following the trail of blood from the scene,” Shouldice said.
Twelve hours after the killing, police arrived at the home of Ndikuriyo’s girlfriend and arrested him in the bedroom.
The trial began Monday after several delays and was originally scheduled to last four weeks. It continues.