Machine gun discovered weeks after shooting, murder trial hears
Alandscaper found a machine gun in juniper bushes 10 weeks after Jonathan Bacon was murdered, court heard Monday. Joel Whitsel, a bobcat operator, was a member of a landscaping crew working at a property on Highland Road North on Nov. 1, 2011.
“I stopped to relieve myself, went over to the junipers to do that, and noticed it in there,” Whitsel said, describing how he found what he and other workers first thought to be a badly-rusted paintball gun.
As they examined it more closely, however, it was clear to the workers it was a real firearm, still with a magazine clip.
“It looked like an AK-47,” Whitsel said, adding that his knowledge of what such a weapon looks like came from movies and video games.
Whitsel said he recalled that he was the only one of the workers on site to handle the firearm after retrieving it from the bushes. He took the weapon to a work truck parked on site, and the owner of the landscaping company called police, court heard.
No precise address was given in court for the property where the firearm was discovered. Highland Drive North is a residential street northwest of Clement Avenue and connects with Glenmore Drive.
It's about three kilometres from the Delta Grand hotel, where Bacon, a Lower Mainland gangster, was killed on the afternoon of Aug. 14, 2011.
Jason McBride, Michael Jones, and Jujhar Khun-Khun are charged with first-degree murder in the killing of Bacon.
They are also charged with the attempted murder of Hells Angel Larry Amero, James Riach from a gang called the Independent Soldiers, and two women, Leah Hadden-Watts and Lyndsey Black, who were wounded in the shooting.
Surveillance video taken from a camera mounted above the employee entrance to the Lake City Casino was also shown in court on Monday morning.
The video shows a silver-coloured SUV crossing Water Street and entering the hotel property at 2:38 p.m. That particular camera angle did not show the shooting, but the silver SUV can be seen leaving the hotel property at 2:40 p.m. and heading east down Cawston Avenue.
In the video, the first police car gets to the scene at 2:42 p.m., with several more officers arriving within the subsequent few minutes.
Last week, court heard that 47 bullets and shell casings, along with 21 bullet fragments, were recovered from the scene of the shooting.
The trial continues.