Jury in trial of jail staff see video of movements
Something was happening in Unit 6 Left the evening of Oct. 31, 2013.
Inmates crowded at the windows of their cell doors, including the window of Cell 3.
The door from the unit to a hallway leading to the correctional officers’ control room was open. Whatever was happening in Cell 3 was 14 metres from that control room.
At 8:18 p.m., a correctional officer shut the control room door.
The next day, an inmate from Cell 3 was found dead, murdered by his cellmate. The actions of that officer, at least those apparent from video surveillance, became the focus of the second day of testimony at an unusual trial in London Wednesday. The officer, Leslie Lonsbary, and an operations manager, Stephen Jurkus, former employees of ElginMiddlesex-Detention Centre (EMDC), are charged with failing to provide the necessaries of life to inmate Adam Kargus.
It’s believed to be the first time in Ontario correctional officers have faced that charge, coming after Kargus, 29, was killed in Cell 3 of Unit 6 Left by Anthony George the night of Oct. 31, 2013.
On Wednesday, the jury continued to watch a splitscreen video taken from two cameras inside EMDC, one showing Unit 6 Left where Kargus was killed, and one showing the correctional officers’ control room down the hall from that unit. London police Sgt. Cam Halliday took the jury through the video, careful to describe the actions inside the cells only as “activity.” There is no audio on the surveillance tapes and the activity takes place behind cell windows.
From about 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. Oct. 31, there was lot of activity at those windows but little around the control room.
About 8 p.m., Lonsbary walked out of the control room about two metres down the hall toward the unit, then turned around and headed back inside the control room. (The jury saw that video surveillance Tuesday and watched the rest Wednesday.) About 8:13 p.m., another correctional officer stopped into the control room for about 30 seconds, then walked down the hall toward the unit, but veered left into a stairwell.
A few seconds later, Lonsbary appeared in the door to look in the same direction then went back inside. About 8:18 p.m., he shut the door to the control room.
London police measured the distance from the control room to Cell 3 as 45 feet, 13.7 metres, the jury heard. EMDC is designed in such as way that officers in the control rooms do not have a direct view of the units, which include the cells and day rooms.
The control rooms do contain monitors for the surveillance cameras on the units, but a photograph of a control room showed that nine separate videos were running at once, each about 10 centimetres by 15 cm on one monitor.