Surveillance video from Kelowna hotel played at Bacon murder trial
Chilling surveillance video showing two gunmen firing on a white SUV and a crowd of people running for their lives was played in B.C. Supreme Court on Thursday.
The grainy video from a Delta Grand Hotel security camera first showed a reflection of the Porsche Cayenne, then parked, outside a set of hotel doors.
People can be seen getting into the car about 2:40 p.m. on Aug. 14, 2011, although it is impossible to see their faces.
Seconds later, as the Porsche starts to drive, a Ford SUV cuts it off and two gunmen can be seen shooting and running.
There is no sound on the eerie video, one of dozens played for Justice Allan Betton at the trial of three men accused of killing gangster Jonathan Bacon that day.
The Porsche can be seen rolling forward, as one person in the back appears to jump out and hide behind a car. The only Porsche passenger uninjured in the shooting was Independent Soldier James Riach.
Jujhar Khun-Khun, Jason McBride and Michael Jones are charged with the first-degree murder of Bacon and the attempted murder of Riach, Hells Angel Larry Amero, Leah Hadden-Watts and Lyndsey Black.
All five were in Amero’s Porsche leaving the courtyard of the Delta Grand when they were targeted by the gunmen.
Betton was also shown video of Bacon, Amero and Black serving themselves brunch in a hotel restaurant about two hours before the murder.
In another clip, they are seen heading out clubbing just before 10 p.m. the night before and returning a few hours later.
The Crown has said that the accused killers arrived in Kelowna in the early hours of Aug. 14 and were hunting for Bacon, Amero and Riach to kill them.
Several gang associates who are now slated to testify against the trio were part of that hunt, the trial has heard.
Three of those men, whose names are covered by a publication ban, were identified in a series of videos played in court Thursday by RCMP forensic video analyst Julianna Masson.
Masson testified that 20,000 hours of surveillance video was seized from the area after the shooting.
A team of officers then went through all of it, looking for anything suspicious that needed further analysis, Masson said.
“If anything of interest was identified on the video, it would come to me to drill down further on it,” she testified.
Masson showed video of the associates in several locations in and around the Grand Hotel starting about 2 a.m. and continuing to 4:30 a.m.
They were in and out of a pub, walking along the lakeside promenade, wandering through the main lobby, and peering into the casino.
The first few video clips Masson played showed a former gang associate named Matthew Schrader inside the Delta Grand near the front entrance.
The Crown said in its opening that Schrader had told an associate of the accused that Amero and Riach were in Kelowna that weekend.
A second video clip shows Schrader in the hotel’s courtyard about 9:20 p.m. on Aug. 13, 2011.
“I was also interested in this individual who was standing there at the front as well,” Masson said, pointing to the clip. “I believed him to be Matthew Schrader.”
Earlier Thursday, retired Cpl. Cora Malewski described processing 47 different bullets and shell casings found at the scene.
They found another 21 bullet fragment pieces when searching the Porsche Cayenne.
Malewski said the SUV had to be taken to a garage with equipment to cut through the muffler and other parts of the vehicle where bullet fragments were found.
The bullets also penetrated the luggage of the victims stacked in the back of the Porsche, she said.
Long after Malewski was finished with her work on the file, she was asked to examine three firearms that were located in November 2011 in some bushes about three kilometres from the shooting.
She checked all three — a Glock 9 mm handgun and two Norinco rifles — for fingerprints and DNA, but found none.
The trial continues.