Mothers weep during testimony at murder trial
TORONTO — For a few minutes on two different occasions Thursday, a Toronto courtroom was rent by the muffled sounds of mothers weeping.
At the trial of alleged serial killer Mark Moore, the case moved chronologically from the slaying of the first victim, Jahmeel Spence, 27, to the shooting of the next two, Courthney Facey and Mike James, 18 and 23, respectively.
The three, as well as Carl Cole, 45, were gunned down on Toronto streets during a 75-day period in the fall of 2010.
Moore, who this week celebrated his 31st birthday, is pleading not guilty to firstdegree murder in the four deaths, which happened in different parts of the city and weren’t linked until forensics revealed the same 9-mm handgun had been used.
As Spence was slain doing something perfectly innocuous — he left a family party to buy a cool drink at a nearby convenience store — so were Facey and James.
On the evening of Sept. 29, 2010, the two young men, who danced and performed professionally together, were in a laneway in the west end, listening to music playing from James’s car, which was parked in the alley.
When Shirlon Marshall, their friend, saw them just before the shooting — they’d been pestering him to join them and finally he stopped by to return a video game to Facey, then headed up the street to buy some cigarettes — Facey was in the driver’s seat, changing the music, James sitting on the trunk.
“They were happy,” Marshall, now 26, said. “They were doing the same thing they do every night. They were gonna go to a party (to dance).”
He hailed them, chatted a bit, then left for the store.
He’d walked only a minute or so when gunshots rang out; Marshall ducked in between buildings until they stopped.
He looked back to his friends, and saw a black BMW X5, the driver’s-side window winding up, coming out of the alley.
This allegedly was Moore; the jurors already have heard he owned such a car.
Marshall noticed that as the BMW turned onto Weston Road in Toronto’s northwest end, its left-turn indicator was on; the driver, whether Moore or someone else, had just shot two men in cold blood but had the presence of mind to indicate a turn.
Marshall ran to James, his best friend, as he said off the top with tender pride.
He’d met James, a chef at a Toronto racetrack, when James dated his sister; he went on to study culinary arts himself. He later met Facey through James.
Prosecutor Sean Hickey told Marshall the jurors had heard the first responders had some difficulty communicating with James; that, Marshall said, was probably because James was partially deaf.
“I would speak really slowly and make hand gestures,” he said.
The first Toronto Police and paramedics were already there, and Marshall was kept away, as was the crowd that soon gathered.
Const. Emma Morley, one of the first on the scene, was helping the medics keep an oxygen mask on James; she kept trying to reassure him they were taking him to hospital but he seemed to have trouble understanding her, and there was something off about his voice. “He actually verbalized to me he was deaf,” she said, so she moved to get over his face, “so he could lip-read.”
She travelled with him to the hospital.
James appeared the less gravely wounded — he was shot in the abdomen and was conscious — but despite the efforts of paramedics, emergency doctors and surgeons at Sunnybrook hospital, he died early the next morning.
In the body of the court, his mother bent over in pain, particularly when Hickey showed a picture on the monitors of James, handsome as all get-out in his graduation garb.
Facey, lying face down in a pool of his own blood, was recognizably the more grievously wounded. He was struggling to breathe, there was so much blood in his mouth and airway.
As Matt Stanfield — he’s a Primary Care Paramedic and with his partner drove the two ambulances to hospital so medics with more advanced training could work on the two young men — testified, Facey’s mother sat with her head in her hands, crying.
A picture of him, a big young amiable-looking kid, also appeared on the monitors.
His airway was “so compromised, and there was so much damage to his mouth and trachea,” Stanfield said, the paramedics took the extraordinary step of “attempting to put in a surgical airway.”
But Facey’s strong young heart stopped beating en route to Sunnybrook, Stanfield said, and “they decided there was nothing else they could do.” He died in the ambulance.
The trial continues Friday.