Witness says accused told her he was one who pulled the trigger
A drug debt and status in Indian Mafia motivated killing, murder trial told
(Bellegarde) was saying how it shook him up, that it was the craziest thing he’d experienced.
In her third and final day REGINA on the witness stand at a Regina murder trial, a woman said Andrew Michael Bellegarde (also known as Mikey Star) shot Reno Lee in April 2015.
“Based on what I was told, it was Mikey that pulled the trigger. … Mikey told me,” the woman, whose identity is protected by a court-ordered publication ban, said before a jury at Regina Court of Queen’s Bench on Thursday morning.
Bellegarde, 24, Bronson Chad Gordon, 33, and Daniel Theodore, 34, are charged with first-degree murder and offering an indignity to human remains.
Lee’s dismembered body was found in a shallow grave on the Star Blanket First Nation, near Balcarres, on April 30, 2015.
A pathologist earlier testified that Lee died from two gunshot wounds to the head. He was allegedly killed on April 16, 2015, in the basement of a house on the 1100 block of Garnet Street.
“(Bellegarde) was saying how it shook him up, that it was the craziest thing he’d experienced,” the woman said Thursday, in cross-examination by Theodore’s defence lawyer George Combe.
“I know that he mentioned seeing the gunshot wound in (Lee’s) cheek and … by shooting him, (Bellegarde) was earning his patch with Indian Mafia,” to become a boss or high-ranking member of the gang, she said.
The woman, who belonged to a gang in Alberta, had been selling crystal meth for a gang that was considered “allies” with the Indian Mafia.
The day of Lee’s death, the woman said, she had returned from accompanying him on a drug run to Calgary and Strathmore. She said she transported four kilograms of crystal meth in her truck — with a street value of more than $600,000. The woman said that she had no knowledge of a plan to rob or injure Lee.
While Lee was a friend, the woman told Combe that she’d considered Bellegarde one of her best friends at the time.
At this, Combe wondered why the woman didn’t ask Bellegarde what was going on while at the Garnet Street house.
“I couldn’t bring myself to go into the basement, and it was all out of my hands,” she said. “If I was meant to know what was going on, I would have been told and I would have known what was happening.”
At Combe’s suggestion, the woman added that she didn’t want Lee to think she’d been involved in the “situation that was going on.”
Combe’s cross-examination lasted most of Thursday, following the Wednesday questioning by Mike Buchinski and Marianna Jasper, defence lawyers for Bellegarde and Gordon, respectively.
The jury will return Tuesday morning as the trial continues.
Combe asked the woman why, if her best friend had just killed someone, she kept hanging around Bellegarde. Seeming to lose her patience for the first time in three days of questioning, the woman replied, “I’ve answered this before, where was I going to go? What would I have done?”
She said Wednesday that she didn’t consider leaving the situation or seeking help from police.
The woman said she’d been scared because she knew “how dangerous these people can be,” as a gang member herself.
The woman said Bellegarde told her, after Lee’s death, that Lee had a “substantial drug debt, that I guess he’d been given the opportunity to pay off and he hadn’t.”
The woman said that, while Lee was in the basement at the Garnet Street house, she heard him being told to “just give it up,” referring to his drug stash.
In testimony on Tuesday, questioned by Crown prosecutor Adam Breker, the woman described sleeping on a couch in the living room of the Garnet Street house and being awoken by a gunshot.
On Thursday, she insisted she only heard one shot, though Lee was shot twice.
Seconds after the gun fired, she said, Bellegarde came upstairs and headed to the bathroom to be sick.
When he joined her in the living room, she said, he seemed in shock, “wild eyed and breathing really heavy.”
She said he told her that shooting someone was a “f---ing rush.”