Recounting the evening a seven-year-old boy was shot
With a publication ban lifted in the case of Jayden Pitter, details of the trial and night in question can finally be reported
It was just before 8 p.m. on May 5 that a special constable reached down and took off Jayden Pitter’s leg shackles. Moments later, the man accused of shooting a sevenyear-old boy walked out the Hamilton courtroom clinging to his family, and they to him.
Pitter was free because a jury had returned a verdict that the tall, heavy-set 22-year-old Hamilton man was not guilty of shooting and nearly killing the boy who was playing inside his east-end Hamilton home. That shooting also occurred just before 8 p.m. two years earlier.
Only now can the public hear the full details of the trial after Superior
Court Justice Toni Skarica agreed to lift a publication ban on the identity and testimony of the Crown prosecutors’ star witness — Pitter’s co-accused, Mohd Amiri.
It was a trial that ultimately hinged on the credibility of Amiri’s version of events and on the reliability of witnesses’ memories. The prosecution told the jury Pitter was the trigger man that night. The defence maintained it was Amiri.
On Jan. 23, 2020, a gunman walked up the side of the boy’s family home on Gordon Street — near Barton and Gage in Hamilton’s east end — and fired two nine-millimetre bullets through a rear window at 7:50 p.m. One bullet was later extracted from a downstairs wall. The other struck the little boy, who can’t be identified because of a separate publication ban. It smashed the child’s left thumb, tore through his abdomen and lodged in his hip. He spent four days on life support.
In the weeks after the shooting, Pitter and Amiri were both arrested and charged with aggravated
assault, as well as intentionally and recklessly firing into a place knowing someone was inside.
Crown prosecutors Amber Lepchuk and Michael Dean told the jury the evidence — especially Amiri’s testimony — showed it was Pitter, a wannabe rapper who went by the nicknames “Lowkey” and “Kyrie,” who fired the pistol. Pitter, they said, frequented the Gordon Street home of the boy, his young sisters and their pregnant mother, and had a beef with another adult in the house.
The little boy’s mother testified she’d seen someone on her surveillance camera walk up the narrow pathway between houses toward her backyard moments before two shots rang out. She didn’t know who it was at first, but said she later recognized him as Pitter.
The jury also heard expert testimony on forensic cellphone evidence that showed Pitter’s and Amiri’s phones were in proximity, pinging off cell towers near Gordon Street just before the shooting. Afterwards, both phones were mapped travelling together along the QEW and then north to Brampton, where Pitter’s father lives. Amiri’s phone travelled back to Hamilton later that night.
Data extracted from Pitter’s phone also showed over 80 searches for news on the shooting in the hours and days after.
Under prosecution questioning, Amiri, 26, of St. Catharines, told the jury he’d connected with Pitter, a casual acquaintance, that day and agreed to drive him to Gordon Street. He said he’d never been there before and had no inkling of what was about to happen.
“(Pitter) told me to wait, turn off the lights, that he was going to grab some weed and that he’d be right back,” Amiri testified. “I saw him go up the path to the backyard, put something over his head, and then disappeared into the shadows there.”
Amiri said that, through the whole time he was on Gordon Street, he never got out of his white Chrysler 200.
“Then I heard two loud bangs … Seconds later, I see Jayden running from the alleyway with his hands tucked down.”
Amiri said he thought Pitter had been shot and reached across to open the passenger door, but that Pitter slipped on the ice against the door before he could get in. Instead of jumping in the front, Pitter ran around the car and dove headfirst into the back driver’s side door.
He said he sped off thinking Pitter was wounded and wanted to get him to the hospital as quickly as possible. That was when he felt something at the back of his head, he said. “I felt a gun on my head. I felt the barrel and it was hot,” Amiri said. “(Pitter) said, ‘Keep driving.’ ”
But Pitter’s defence lawyer, Scott Reid, argued Amiri himself was the shooter because Amiri was angry at an adult in the home. Reid said Amiri, who worked as a takeout delivery driver, turned Crown witness to hide his role in the shooting and pin it on Pitter.
“I suggest you enjoy causing and seeing people in pain, right?” Reid asked Amiri under cross-examination.
“No, I deny that,” Amiri responded.
“I suggest you’re not upset whatsoever anyone got shot or that is was a child,” Reid continued. “You caused an entire family significant pain and trauma, right?”
“No, that is not true at all,” Amiri replied.
Taylor McNally testified that she was staying at a home near the address in question and had just returned from a nearby McDonald’s. She told the jury she was opening the front door when she heard “what I thought were fireworks.” Then, realizing it was gunshots, McNally testified she cowered on the front porch and looked to see what was going on. She told the jury she saw a hunched-over figure run from between the homes and dive into a white car. She told the jury that for a fleeting second she caught sight of the man’s upper cheek and that she thought the skin was “white or a Middle Eastern skin tone.”
Amiri, originally from Afghanistan, is lighter-skinned. Pitter is black.
In his closing argument to the jury, Reid said police and prosecutors fell victim to tunnel vision in building a case against Pitter as the shooter. He said it was Amiri who jumped out of the car, ran the narrow walkway between the homes and fired at the house, accidentally hitting the little boy.
“Amiri then lied about it to the police, at the preliminary hearing and to you, the jury,” Reid told the jurors.
Under cross-examination, Reid took Amiri through large portions of his four-hour police video interrogation with Det. Daryl Reid. For hours, Amiri denied knowing anything about the shooting, alternately crying and pleading with the detective to tell him why he was being interrogated.
“I know I didn’t shoot no little boy,” Amiri told the detective, denying he was there. “That’s not my car there.”
In the end, Amiri admitted in the police interview that he and Pitter were together at the time of the shooting, but swore he didn’t know what was about to happen and that he’d stayed in his car the whole time.
“You’re the driver of the car?” the detective asked Amiri in the interview. “Yes,” Amiri answered.
Under cross-examination, Reid asked Amiri if he changed his story because he hoped the detective would somehow help him.
“No, I just wanted him to know the truth,” Amiri answered.
Reid pointed to Health app data extracted from Amiri’s iPhone that recorded Amiri taking 26 steps and moving 18.16 metres around the time of the shooting. “That’s exactly the time you said you were sitting in your car,” the lawyer said. “And 18.16 metres is close to the length of a round trip from the sidewalk to the location of the shots.”
“That’s you getting out, running to the backyard and shooting through the window,” Reid said. Amiri told the jury he never got out of the car.
Staff Sgt. David Mckenzie, a Hamilton police cellphone data extraction expert, testified the Health app registered the 26 steps but that they occurred two and a half minutes after the time of the shooting. He concluded Amiri was not moving at the time of the shooting.
“I concluded the Health app data, from 19:53 to 19:57, was done after the shooting and the phone never left the vehicle during the shooting,” Mckenzie testified. He said the phone’s time was set automatically by the system’s network.
Under cross-examination, Reid asked Mckenzie is it was possible to manually override the phone’s time setting. Mckenzie said yes.
“So the owner (of the phone) could have changed from manual back to automatic time after the shooting?” Reid asked.
“That would have been reflected in the data,” Mckenzie replied.
The prosecution’s other key witness was the boy’s mother, who can’t be named. She told the jury she’d put her children to bed after dinner that night and retired to her own bed early because she was feeling queasy. She said she heard her boy sneak back downstairs to keep playing with some other adults in the home.
She testified she was watching a surveillance feed of the front door on her bedroom TV when she noticed a white car pull up and a man slowly walk in front of her house before disappearing up her walkway toward her backyard. Within seconds, she said, she heard two gunshots followed by the screams of her son downstairs.
She told the jury she didn’t immediately recognize the man because of the chaos and panic that followed, but described the figure as large, bulky and wearing a puffy grey jacket. She said it was only later at hospital, while waiting as surgeons fought to save her son’s life, that she was she able to think more clearly. She told the jury that while she didn’t see his face, she recognized Pitter from his walk, his build and grey jacket.
Prosecutors also showed the jury texts between Pitter and his girlfriend at the time, who was a nursing student in Hamilton, asking if she knew anything about the shooting and the boy’s condition. The woman texted back that she’d heard from “her girl” in the McMaster Children’s Hospital trauma centre that the boy was fighting for his life.
Pitter’s defence lawyer told the jury that the witnesses who saw the shooter described him as six-foot and around 170 pounds. “Mr. Pitter is six-foot-three and 240 pounds.”
Mohd Amiri is scheduled to go on trial on Aug. 22.