Club owner recalls treating 2015 shooting victim

A downtown Windsor nightclub owner’s military training kicked in when staff raced over to tell him a victim of multiple gunshot wounds was lying near the dance floor, bleeding.

“I took off my belt to help separate the wounds from the heart,” said Dan Patterson of Level 3 Vodka Emporium. Surveillance footage captured a wounded Phillip Nkrumah racing up the stairs to the third-floor dance club from where he’d departed a short time before three shots rang out in an adjacent alley at about 12:55 a.m. on Sept. 28, 2015. Only moments after sitting down at a table near the entrance, the Brampton man slumped forward onto the floor. Alerted by staff, Patterson, who is one of the nightclub’s majority owners, rushed over, took off his belt and quickly fashioned it as a tourniquet above bleeding wounds on the victim’s left leg.

With weekend nightclubbers dancing and partying in the background, but a growing number of patrons becoming alert to the emergency scene and gathering around, Patterson and staff then moved the wounded man to a private office area. Patterson said they “carried” Nkrumah away, but video surveillance footage played Tuesday at the attempted murder trial of Nicholas McCullough show clearly how he was dragged out of the dance and bar area.

When asked by assistant Crown attorney Renee Puskas whether he had first aid training, Patterson responded that he had been in the U.S. Marine Corps for nine years before going into business. Once inside the office, the others were shoo’d away, the door was closed and Patterson was left alone with Nkrumah.

“I asked him if he was carrying a weapon. He said no.” An experienced nightclub operator, the next thing Patterson did was kick the man’s pocket anyway, to make sure he wasn’t carrying a gun. Then, he testified, he pulled down the man’s pants to inspect and cover the wounds. As he did so, “a lot of things were falling out of his pockets,” including phones, money and “baggies with drugs.” He said he saw three wounds. Standing up in the witness box, he pointed to their locations — two bullet holes in the upper left thigh and one in the centre of the left buttock.

Much of the second day of McCullough’s trial was spent like the first, with hours of testimony on security camera locations and angles of coverage and on what they captured that night. Patterson said 14 of 16 security cameras at Level 3 Vodka Emporium, with its main entrance on Park Street just west of Ouellette Avenue, were working that night. He said downtown businesses and building managers regularly co-operate with each other when surveillance footage is needed to help with legal action. In the past, he said, Level 3 has received such help from 29 Park, another nightclub located directly across from the main entrance, and from Royal Windsor Terrace, a condo highrise across the alley from where the Sept. 28 shooting took place. “It was bang, bang, bang,” said Hayden Martin, who was Level 3’s doorman that night. He testified that when he stepped out onto the sidewalk to see what happened, a man later identified as the shooting victim raced past him and back into the nightclub.

Under cross-examination by defence lawyer Frank Miller, Martin, 24, agreed that the nightclub’s video is “pretty poor quality stuff, correct.”

The prosecution has video footage of the actual shooting, but there is no clear facial identity of the gunman. Puskas told the Superior Court trial’s opening that, through the combined evidence via video footage that followed that night’s chain of events, Nicholas McCullough will be proven as the culprit.

I took off my belt to help separate the wounds from the heart. I asked him if he was carrying a weapon. He said no.