Widow tells court of her horror when police found body
TORONTO — The slender young man in the black ball cap and jacket ambled to the wall of fridges at the back of the convenience store.
He spent a minute or two choosing a bottle of fruit punch and then made his way to the cash, paid for it, got his change and disappeared from camera range.
It was 9:21 p.m. local time on Sept. 10, 2010, and the surveillance cameras so omnipresent in the modern world caught Jahmeel Spence, alive, for the very last time.
Seven minutes later, Toronto Police Const. Michael Robertson got a “hotshot” — an emergency call — on his radio about gunshots.
He and his partner were close, and were the first on the scene, so quick to get there Robertson could still smell gunpowder in the air.
In the laneway behind a small townhouse complex in the city’s Scarborough area, they saw the young man on the ground, lying on his left side, his legs crossed at the ankles.
But for the pool of blood beneath him and the blood flowing from his face and the spent shell cases around his body and the brain matter in the ball cap that had just moments before looked so rakish on the video, Spence could have been just taking a nap.
On Thursday, at the trial of the man accused of killing Spence, his widow came to testify about the horror of that night.
Their little son, then just four years old, had just started his first day of kindergarten, and the family had gathered to celebrate at her mom’s place, both the little boy and their little girl in tow. Shivonne Clarke and Spence had been together for almost eight years, and knew one another even before that.
She was getting antsy to leave; it was past the kids’ bedtime. But Spence went to the corner store for his drink.
He’d just texted her — were their kids going to sleep over at grandma’s, he asked, as if hopeful for a night alone with his girl. “As I was reading it and walking toward the door, I heard gunshots,” she said.
She got the kids away from the door and back into her mom’s living room, looked out the rear window and saw “a man running and shooting,” sparks coming out of the gun.
The family did a bit of a quick head count; Spence wasn’t there.
Clarke called her cousin, who lived across the street, hoping Spence had stopped in to see him. He wasn’t there. “I think I stood in the backyard,” she said, quietly wiping tears from her face. “As well as trying to look for him, I was calling his phone, just over and over.”
She saw a cruiser drive into the lane, then watched as two officers (Robertson and his partner) got out.
“It looked like they were looking down at something,” she said, and it was clear she recognized right away what that might be. Weeping still, she said, “I ran out.”
She saw Spence’s shoes — distinctive green and white runners — first. “The closer I got, I saw that it was him.”
As she testified, in the prisoner’s box, Mark Moore was on high alert — sitting ramrod straight, his posture so good it was almost childlike, hands in his pockets, he was paying rapt attention.
Moore is not only the accused killer of Spence, who was just 27, but also of three other men: Courthney Facey, Mike James and Carl Cole, ages 18, 23 and 45, respectively.
He is pleading not guilty to four counts of first-degree murder.
All four were shot to death within a 75-day period in the late summer and fall of 2010 in Toronto.
At least three of them — and perhaps Cole, too, though that isn’t yet clear — had never met Moore before. They weren’t gangsters or criminals, but peaceable citizens going about their business, listening to music in one case, buying a drink in Spence’s.
Prosecutor Sean Hickey asked Clarke to look at Moore. “Have you ever seen him before, except in court?” “No,” she said. “Did Jahmeel know him?” “No,” she said wearily. Their children, now almost nine and seven, have lived longer without their dad than they did with him.
The trial continues.