Ian Bush’s wife didn’t know anything about the toolkit for murder down in the basement.

But she certainly recognized the bag.

“It’s my old briefcase,” she testified at her ex-husband’s triple-murder trial on Thursday.

Ian Bush, 61, is on trial for the savage 2007 killings of retired tax judge Alban Garon, his wife Raymonde, and friend Marie-Claire Beniskos. The seniors were bound, beaten and suffocated inside the judge’s Riverside Drive condo. 

Under examination-in-chief by assistant Crown attorney James Cavanagh, the accused killer’s ex-wife said she didn’t recognize its key contents — including a sawed-off .22 rifle, live ammo and heavy plastic bags marked with suffocation warnings. The dishwashing gloves may have been hers, she said.

She also testified she didn’t know her ex-husband had been writing a crime novel he billed as a sophisticated crime case, and not a “message from another homicidal kook looking for her 15 minutes of fame.”

There was a lot she didn’t know about her ex-husband. “I was always told his business is none of my business,” said the ex-wife, whose identity is shielded by a publication ban. 

She also revealed to the jury that their “up-and-down” union was far removed from perfect.

They fought constantly, and worse, she testified: “He belittled me all the time.” 

She was the breadwinner in the family, while Bush ran a failed consultant firm that listed names of fake associates to make his one-man, home-office company look bigger.

His ex-wife also recalled Bush’s deep hatred for the tax man.

She recalled him saying: “Those rat bastards aren’t going to get any more money out of me.”

“He was against taxation. He was very angry. His voice would rise and I used to say ‘Calm down, calm down,'” she told court.

He owed $17,000 in income tax and Bush borrowed the money from his mother to pay it, she testified.

The prosecution theory is that Bush — enraged over the bitter tax feud — targeted Garon, the former chief justice of Canada’s tax court. The judge, according to prosecutors, was the “focal point of his rage” while his wife and Beniskos were at the wrong place at the wrong time.

The jury has also heard about an “arrogant and insulting” letter that Bush faxed to the retired judge, in which he summoned him to his home for a bizarre hearing. The letter, first reported in the Citizen in 2015, summoned Garon to appear at an address in Orléans — Bush’s home — to review a decision that dismissed his income-tax appeal.

The case against Bush, who has pleaded not guilty to three counts of first-degree murder, is anchored in DNA — his blood and hair found at the scene — and security video of him at a nearby OC Transpo station moments before and after the killings.

Police linked him to the killings in 2015 after DNA evidence from an unrelated violent crime matched profiles found at the 2007 crime scene.

It was his son, Brock Bush, who helped police identify his father in the OC Transpo video that was shown for the jury Thursday. The jury was also shown a 2015 videotaped police interview with Brock Bush, who was asked to review the footage.

“That’s my dad,” Brock Bush tells Sgt. Greg Brown.

He picked him out right away, saying he could tell by his clothes, his bag, the way he walked and his fanny pack (where his father kept his chewing tobacco and money).

There’s no doubt that’s your dad, the homicide detective asks.

“Yeah, like 95 per cent for sure,” Brock Bush says.

Brock Bush also testified against his father Thursday.

He said he’s now 100 per cent sure it’s his father in the video.

Asked by Cavanagh to explain the different answer, Brock Bush told court that back in 2015 he was still in “a state of shock” over his father’s arrest.

The trial resumes Monday at the Elgin Street courthouse.

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The ex-RCMP counter terrorism investigator who starved and tortured his 11-year-old son in a Kanata basement in 2013 is appealing his sentence, complaining that the trial judge failed to attach enough weight to his post-traumatic stress disorder. 

The former Mountie was sentenced to 15 years in April for cruel and barbaric crimes against his own son, who weighed only 50 pounds when he escaped his chains. Emergency room doctors cried when they first saw the child, saying he almost starved to death.

The former Mountie — who was convicted in November and fired by the RCMP weeks later — was also banned for life from ever being closer than two kilometres to his son.

In a handwritten appeal filed from jail, the convicted father, 45, has turned to Ontario’s appeal court with the hopes of a lighter sentence.

The 10-month trial was anchored in a series of haunting cellphone videos of the former Mountie interrogating his naked, shackled son in a darkened basement.

“I’m ashamed and sorry for being a monster to you,” the disgraced ex-police officer told court before he was sentenced for assault, sexual assault, forcible confinement and failing to provide the necessities of life.

The boy spent the last month of his captivity trying to escape his basement horror in which he was chained to a post while the rest of his family went about their routines upstairs.

“The extreme violence and psychological degradation was beyond comprehension,” said Ontario Superior Court Justice Robert Maranger, who also noted the boy had been robbed of his childhood.

The father testified in his own defence, and presented himself as a victim, speaking for hours about his fragile state of mind. He detailed the troubles of his own childhood in war-torn Lebanon. He talked about dead bodies, bombs and the day he was raped by a teacher.

He spoke of “extreme nightmares” from his youth, his troubled career in the RCMP and how a so-called problem child was the last thing he needed. He tried to explain that he thought his boy was possessed and he feared he’d grow up to be a sexual predator.

“Me and my son were at war … I had an enemy in front of me.”

Dr. Helen Ward, a psychiatrist hired by the defence, testified that the man suffered from “chronic and severe” PTSD and narcissism.

The ex-Mountie saw his son as possessed and wild, though he wasn’t by everyone else’s accounts, from teachers to doctors to neighbours and family.

The former Mountie, whose name is blocked by a publication ban, was credited for pre-trial custody, reducing his prison term to 13 years.

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He’s the Ottawa hacker who liked to brag at school about his online powers, the ones he abused.

Out of twisted revenge for his own troubles at school, the 16-year-old boy launched a dark online campaign in 2014, first by calling in a fake bomb threat at his own school, and then beyond.

And he made time to taunt police on Twitter, saying “Catch me if you can.”

Well, they did. 

On Friday, the Barrhaven teen who terrorized children by calling in fake bomb threats at schools across Canada and the United States was convicted of the swatting crimes.

Ontario Court Justice Mitch Hoffman found the teen guilty on 34 counts (from public mischief to uttering threats) related to a series of fake bomb calls that prompted SWAT teams to respond to schools from Calgary to Florida. 

The boy used a Twitter account to advertise his swatter-for-hire services, and business was brisk, with troubled teens enlisting him to call in bomb threats to their schools.

A 14-year-old Ontario boy enlisted the hacker to call in a bomb threat at his school because he wanted to be cool. He felt anything but cool when detectives came calling, and he promptly gave a tearful confession.

In some cases, the Barrhaven hacker would give advance warning on Twitter and later claim responsibility.

The judge-alone trial that began in 2015 also heard a Quebec boy who used the hacker’s swatter-for-hire services also confessed on the spot and later pleaded guilty for enlisting him to call in a bomb threat to his Laval high school.

The judge also rejected the boy’s cover story, in which he claimed he had been framed by Anonymous, the international hacktivist collective.

The judge said Anonymous may have methods that some disagree with, but the hacktivist group is known for its justice crusades and political goals, and was certainly not in the business of framing “innocent persons and terrorizing schoolchildren.”

The judge also said there was no evidence “in real life, nor online” to suggest, even “theoretically” that the teen had been framed.

“It is not a rational deduction that the (teen) was framed,” Hoffman told court in a day-long reading of his verdict in the high-profile case.

The judge also rejected the defence-raised suggestion that a third-party could have planted the evidence on the boy’s computer that police seized. The judge noted the boy is a “sophisticated computer user” who was frequently online and known for stocking up on anti-virus software. It would be implausible for this to go undetected, he said. The judge also rejected that a third-party suspect could have remotely accessed the boy’s computer through a Trojan program.

In all of the fake calls to police, court heard, the accused mostly disguised his voice. But in one call, the accused is plainly heard as himself. 

The Barrhaven hacker was also convicted for calling in a fake bomb threat to a Quebec shopping mall.

The judge praised Ottawa police detectives for an exhaustive investigation, which included analysis of more than 200,000 Skype and chat logs on the boy’s computer. 

Assistant Crown attorney Kerry McVey led the successful prosecution against the teen who still has outstanding warrants in Florida. 

Some of the hacker’s targets — including an Ottawa teen — were wrongly arrested after he spoofed their online identity to make it look like they were the ones who had called in the threat. The Ottawa teen was later released.

The boy — whose identity is shielded by law — was arrested by Ottawa police in 2014 after the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation traced his IP address to his parents’ home in Barrhaven and forwarded the information, court heard.

The boy, represented by defence lawyer Joshua Clarke, was acquitted on four counts related to swatting calls in California.

The teen awaits sentencing. 

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It wasn’t always like this for the boy in the prisoner’s box, the white pride kid who calls himself the son of Hitler.

There was a time when he had friends and played hockey.

But in 2015, the teen’s life took a rapid turn that had nothing to do with booze or drugs, but rather the demons in his mind. His family wondered if he was hearing voices. He got into trouble at school when he started obsessing about a classmate, sometimes reciting the classmate’s home address and punching him for no reason.

The teen, a member of an online white power network, believes there is an anti-white conspiracy and that he has to somehow protect the “extinction” of his race.

In 2016, he started spewing his hatred in public, spray-painting swastikas and satanic slogans on places of worship around town. The community rallied, the Ottawa police caught the hate-graffiti boy and he pleaded guilty to five charges including inciting hatred, threatening people because of their race or religion, and possessing dangerous weapons.

On Tuesday, at the teen’s sentencing hearing, an Ottawa court heard about the state of his untreated mind.

Dr. John Fedoroff, the forensic psychiatrist who assessed the teen, testified that the young offender likely has schizophrenia. In his interview with the doctor, the teen recounted his hate-graffiti crimes matter-of-factly, blamed his crimes on Jews, and described himself as a skinhead and all around “nice guy” who is not violent.

The teen, who has refused treatment, told the psychiatrist that he’s learned his lesson and won’t do it again.

But the doctor isn’t buying it.

“He clearly hasn’t learned his lessons and still (holds) to his original belief of a conspiracy against white people. I don’t really think he’s changed that much and still has paranoid beliefs about the world,” Fedoroff told court.

The teen had trouble sticking to his story, and the psychiatrist noted that it was hard for him to get a straight explanation about what the teen had done. It seemed clear, however, that the boy’s behaviour, before and after his arrest was designed to provoke anger and get attention, said Fedoroff, who told court that the teen needs to be monitored.

If left untreated, the psychiatrist said schizophrenics can “be very dangerous (if) they believe their life is in danger.”

In the interview, the teen told the doctor: “I’ll only fight if my life is in danger.”

The sentencing hearing also heard about some dark times at an Ottawa youth jail, where the boy, who was found with a homemade wooden “shank,” once scrawled on his wall that he wanted to slit a woman’s throat and watch her bleed to death. 

The teen turned 18 days after his 2016 arrest and could still be sentenced as an adult. The teen, who cannot be named because he was arrested as a minor, had a Facebook page filled with Nazi slogans and threats of violence against Jews, Muslims and non-white people, as well as children.

 After a 14-week trial, the jury in the first-degree murder trial of Carson Morin is now deliberating the fate of the killer who had dreams of running a stripper network from his Orléans condo.

It wasn’t a Whodunnit? case, with the jury hearing early on that Morin, 24, admitted he slit Mike Wassill’s throat but didn’t plan to, nor did he intend to kill. 

Morin took the stand in his own defence at trial and tried to explain away his deadly path on May 15, 2013. He said a stripper owed him money and he was behind in rent, and needed it badly. The stripper had sought refuge at Wassill’s Orléans home. Wassill spent his last act in life trying to protect his friend from the rage of a cold-blooded killer, prosecutors told the jury.

Morin told the jury he had problems in the past, with him dodging bullets in the streets from rivals, and it was out of fear that he armed himself with a box-cutter when he showed up at Wassill’s house to collect his money, or as he called it, “my paper.” 

And he said he slipped on latex gloves because it calmed his nerves and boosted his confidence, and when it came to recounting the moment he slit Wassill’s throat, Morin wanted the jury to believe that “I didn’t mean to hurt him.”

“It was for my own protection. It was a last resort. I didn’t intend to use it,” he testified.

Morin also made a point of telling the jury that he was “on trial for my life right now.”

In closing arguments earlier this week, his defence lawyer Leo Russomanno urged the jury to convict him of manslaughter, saying the murder case against Morin fell short, and that his client didn’t intend, nor plan to kill Wassill. Russomanno noted that Morin’s post-offence behaviour alone plainly showed that his client did anything but plan out the killing.

The Crown is looking for a first-degree murder conviction and has presented Morin as a lying, cold-blooded killer. His victim, Wassill, was known to friends and family as a standup guy who was always there for his friends, like he was on the last day of his life, court heard.

The jury heard Morin panicked after the killing, and ran at the sight of Wassill grabbing at his bleeding neck. Morin later turned himself in to police, but not before changing his clothes and dumping the bloody knife and gloves.

His other defence lawyer, Natasha Calvinho, has told the jury Morin has been wracked with guilt.

It’s pretty hard to persuade a jury that you didn’t mean to kill when you came in latex gloves, armed with a knife.

And on Friday, after a 14-week trial, a jury found Carson Morin guilty of first-degree murder in the 2013 death of Michael Wassill, who spent his last moments in life trying to protect a friend from the cold-blooded killer at the door.

Shortly after the guilty verdict, the family of Mike Wassill finally got the chance to tell the jury about the slain man, describing him as gentle, bright and too young to die.

His mother, Betty-Ann Wassill, addressed the jury.

“In this trial, you have not heard that Michael was a beacon of friendship and acceptance to all who knew him,” she said.

Michael Wassill’s throat was slit at his home on May 15, 2013.

She likened the gruelling trial of her son’s killer, and all of its graphic evidence, to a gaping wound that will never heal.

“Any parent who loses a child will tell you that the crippling grief they experience never goes away. Added to that, these lengthy and arduous legal proceedings have intensified the horrible pain we are experiencing and that has prevented us from savouring the countless sweet memories we have of Michael,” she told the court.

She said being in court was like reliving the horrors of May 15, 2013, from the last violent moments of her son’s life, to his final gasps for breath, heard in a 911 call.

The grieving mother said her faith in humanity has been badly shaken and asked her son’s killer to show remorse and accept responsibility and pleaded for him not to appeal his conviction.

“Don’t continue to inflict pain on our family,” she said.

“If we cannot have Michael in our lives, at least we know that justice has been served in his name,” she told court.

Other family members also read heartfelt victim-impact statements that spoke of the painful trial, depression and, as his sister Sarah Wassill said, “a deep, hollow, overwhelming desire to see” him again.

The killer’s mother, seated on the other side of the courtroom, sobbed as the verdict was read, and the young killer stood slumped over the glass of the prisoner’s box.

Morin declined to address the court when afforded the chance.

He was sentenced to life in prison without chance of parole for 25 years.

It wasn’t a whodunnit case, with the jury hearing early on that Morin, 24, admitted he had slashed Wassill’s throat but saying he didn’t plan to, and that he did not intend to kill.

Morin, who had dreams of running a stripper-and-escort network from his Orléans condo, took the stand in his own defence at trial and tried to explain away his deadly path on May 15, 2013. He said a stripper owed him money and he was behind in rent, and needed it badly. The stripper had sought refuge at Wassill’s Orléans home. Wassill spent his last act in life trying to protect his friend from the rage of a killer, prosecutors told the jury.

Carson Morin was charged with first-degree murder in the death Michael Wassill.

Morin told the jury he’d had problems in the past, and that he had dodged bullets in the streets from rivals. He said it was out of fear that he armed himself with a box-cutter when he showed up at Wassill’s house to collect his money, or as he called it, “my paper.”

And he said he slipped on latex gloves because it calmed his nerves and boosted his confidence, and when it came to recounting the moment he slit Wassill’s throat, Morin wanted the jury to believe that “I didn’t mean to hurt him.”

“It was for my own protection. It was a last resort. I didn’t intend to use it,” he testified.

The jury didn’t buy it.

In closing arguments earlier this week, Morin’s defence lawyer, Leo Russomanno, urged the jury to convict him of manslaughter, saying the murder case against Morin fell short, and that his client didn’t intend, nor did he plan to kill Wassill. Russomanno noted that Morin’s post-offence behaviour alone plainly showed his client did anything but plan out the killing.

The Crown was looking for a first-degree murder conviction and presented Morin as a liar. His victim, Wassill, was known to friends and family as a standup guy who would always be there when you needed him.

The jury heard Morin panicked after the killing, and ran at the sight of Wassill grabbing at his bleeding neck. Morin later turned himself in to police, but not before changing his clothes and dumping the bloody knife and gloves.

His other defence lawyer, Natasha Calvinho, told the jury Morin had been wracked with guilt.

In his opening address to the jury, Assistant Crown Attorney Jason Neubauer said it wasn’t a case of a jealous boyfriend who killed for love, but rather greed.

“She wanted out and Mr. Morin wouldn’t stand for it … and Mr. Morin’s refusal to let her go led to the death of Mike (Wassill),” Neubauer told the jury.

Prosecutors noted Morin’s own texts showed he was brooding about revenge.

“You ever see me snap on a b—? you’re gonna,” he texted someone in the days leading to killing.

The trial also heard about Morin’s plans to start a stripper empire. Morin installed a stripper pole in his Orléans condo, complete with mirrors, so his new recruits could nail down their dance sets. He gave advice on what they should wear — “stripping is all about looking good,” he said — and helped come up with stage names and pick the music for their routines.

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He had just been convicted in the horrific killings of three Ottawa seniors, including a retired judge. He had just heard a haunting statement from a grieving family, had just been sentenced to life in prison, and had just been scolded by a judge for the depths of his evil.

And still, Ian Bush, 61-year-old failed consultant, left Courtroom No. 34 grinning.

At trial, the jury heard that only a monster could have hogtied, beaten and suffocated three gentle, innocent seniors: retired tax court judge Alban Garon, his wife, Raymonde, and their friend, Marie-Claire Beniskos.

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Outside court after the guilty verdicts Wednesday, they said only a monster could have walked away grinning like that.

Bush smiled a lot during the seven-week trial. It was as if he thought he was in charge of it all. But when it came down to it, he had no influence over it, and didn’t actually say anything. He didn’t take the stand in his own defence and when Ontario Superior Court Justice Colin McKinnon afforded him the chance to speak after sentencing Wednesday, Bush shook his head.

The jury took less than an hour and a half to decide Bush’s fate. And that included lunch, at a picnic table down the street from the Elgin Street courthouse.

Courtroom sketch of Ian Bush.

The jury ruled that an obsessed Bush, enraged over a bitter tax feud, targeted retired chief tax court judge Garon, in a murderous plot that included stealing his money. Garon’s wife and friend were killed for being at the wrong place at the wrong time.

Bush put plastic bags over their head and suffocated them after beating them. He put a hangman’s noose around the judge’s neck and beat him violently about the head.

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• 'True hero' cracked triple-murder case: judge

Ontario Superior Court Justice Colin McKinnon told court that the crimes were inexplicable and steeped in gratuitous, spectacular violence.

That Bush dragged his own family through a trial — forcing them to testify — spoke to the depths of his evil, the judge told court.

“You have no shame whatsoever,” the judge chastised.

The judge also took the opportunity to call out Bush for his contempt in court, noting that he was the only one who refused to stand in court when the presiding judge entered.

Retired federal tax judge Alban Garon, and his wife, Raymonde.

In a moving victim-impact statement by the Beniskos family, which was read in court by Crown Attorney James Cavanagh, they spoke of horror and despair. They called him a coward who killed innocent people he didn’t even know.

Marie-Claire Beniskos was tragically in the wrong place at the wrong time, the court heard.

They said he killed for fun, greed and attention. They hoped that the rest of his life would be spent in a cage, like an animal, and where, they told the court, he belongs.

After the verdicts, one of Judge Garon’s close friends, Jean-Claude Demers, said he hopes that Bush dies in jail.

Jean Perley, a friend of the victims, told the Citizen after the verdict that they were sweet folks and that their deaths were unbelievable, particularly because they had moved into their security condos on Riverside Drive to be safe.

Jean Perley talks to the media in front of the court house in Ottawa Wednesday.

The Crown attorney, who acknowledged it was the quickest verdict he’s seen, praised the jury for its intelligence and due diligence. Cavanagh also praised the police work of Staff Sgt. Tim Hodgins, Det. Krista Hill and Sgt. Dan Brennan as well as his fellow Crown, Tim Wightman.

As the seasoned prosecutor walked out of the Elgin Street courthouse, he declared: “Justice has been served.”

After linking Bush to the killings in 2015, police searched his home and seized a toolkit for murder, which included duct tape, rubber gloves, a sawed-off rifle, ammunition and plastic bags.

Ottawa police also found a handwritten journal, anchored in the ramblings of a man who wrote that tax collectors were the “lowest form of humanity” and likened them to extortionists.

During the trial, the jury — 11 men, one woman — heard that Ottawa police found DNA evidence at the crime scene that they matched to Bush years later.

Police found a hair in the Garon’s home that Bush later admitted was his.

Bush’s defence lawyer, Geraldine Castle-Trudel, argued that police had “tunnel vision” after identifying Bush as a suspect and that they had ignored evidence. In closing statements, she called it a “dangerous rush to judgment.”

After the verdict, she described the jury as mature. She said the jury did its job, and she did hers.

The lawyer also said the convictions are expected to be appealed.

Bush was sentenced to life in prison without parole eligibility for 25 years.

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Levy Kasende had finally embraced his future as a young father but the crack dealer couldn’t escape his past, and on the other side of midnight on Aug. 25, 2012, it caught up to him in a drive-by shooting that left him dead outside a rowhouse in Blackburn Hamlet. 

“It is a sad and shocking story, but a simple one: Levy Kasende was shot through the heart,” declared prosecutor Matthew Geigen-Miller in his opening address Tuesday to the jury at Michael Belleus’s first-degree murder trial. 

The Crown theory, adopted from the police investigation, is that Belleus, now 25, shot rival crack dealer Kasende, 22, out of revenge. (Kasende had shot Belleus in the arm on Canada Day in 2010 over a drug-turf feud, prosecutors said.)

At 1:45 a.m. on Aug. 25, 2012, Belleus pulled up to Kasende’s girlfriend’s rowhouse on Innes Road. Kasenda was outside smoking when Belleus opened fire from the driver’s side window of a borrowed Mazda minivan, the jury heard. Kasende was shot in the right thigh, and in the back — the fatal shot as the bullet went through his heart.

Sketch of Mike Belleus, the man charged in the 2012 gun death of Levy Kasende.

The getaway van was found burning on Rockdale Road near Highway 417 in the city’s east end shortly after the killing. Belleus then left town for Montreal, the jury heard.

Belleus was bent on revenge for two years and had offered $2,000 on the street for anyone who could tell him where he could find Kasende.

And on the night he died, Kasende wouldn’t have been hard to find. That’s because his girlfriend, and the mother of child, had just moved into Belleus’s “crack territory,” out on Innes Road, and just a few doors down from an associate of the accused killer. 

In haunting words recalled in court by the prosecutor, Kasende himself told friends: “This neighbourhood is going to be the death of me.”

Kasende knew the east-end streets well and knew Belleus was after him. In fact, when he went to visit his girlfriend and child on the night of Aug. 24, he brought a sawed-off shotgun, the one he tucked under her bed just in case, Geigen-Miller told the attentive jury. 

The jury — four women, eight men — heard that the Ottawa police case, led by Sgt. Darren Vinet and Det. Chris Benson, is anchored in eyewitnesses, surveillance and authorized wiretaps. 

The prosecution’s case is also anchored in a voice from the grave.

Before dying of cancer, one of the accused killer’s crack customers came forward to police and said he wanted to finally tell the truth. He loaned Belleus his minivan, the one found engulfed in flames after the killing, he confessed. He had originally told detectives that he didn’t know anything about it and may have lost the keys to his minivan, Geigen-Miller told the jury.

Belleus’s customer wanted to tell the truth back in 2012 but was too afraid, Geigen-Miller said.

The customer only knew his dealer by his street name, but before he died, he identified him after reviewing police mug shots, the prosecutor told the jury. He also told police that he had loaned his minivan out to Belleus in the past, usually in exchange for drugs or money.

In detailing the revenge motive, the prosecutor told the jury that back in 2010, Belleus was irate and refused to co-operate with police, and told Sgt. Shane Henderson that he’d deal with it himself. He also told police to stop bothering his family after they came knocking. 

Belleus has pleaded not guilty and is represented by Neil Weinstein and Anne London-Weinstein. Assistant Crown Attorneys Fara Rupert along with Geigen-Miller are prosecuting the case with Ontario Superior Court Justice Kevin Phillips presiding.

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The college student accused of killing 18-year-old Connor Stevenson in the sixth-floor stairwell at 2020 Jasmine Cres. in 2015 has been freed on bail while he awaits trial for second-degree murder. 

David Dubois, 21, is accused of knifing the teenager to death on April 14, 2015 over a bag of pot. The police theory is that Stevenson left his Jasmine Towers apartment to sell weed in the stairwell only to be killed by Dubois, a one-time friend of the slain teen who he worked with at Tim Hortons on Montreal Road.

Dubois, represented by defence lawyers Ewan Lyttle and Brett McGarry, was freed on bail by Ontario Superior Court Justice Giovanna Toscano Roccamo on Thursday.

The accused killer was released on strict conditions that require him to wear a GPS ankle bracelet and stay clear (100 metres) of 2020 Jasmine Cres. Dubois has to live with his parents and has to be with one of them if he leaves his home. He had to surrender his passport and is not allowed to do drugs, have any weapons or contact a slew of witnesses expected to testify at his trial. 

Dubois was arrested hours after Stevenson was laid to rest in 2015. At the funeral, friends and family remembered Stevenson as a devoted son and loving boyfriend. His girlfriend told a packed church that she felt like her heart had been ripped out, and that she cries herself to sleep at night with the hope that his killing was just a bad dream.

He was also remembered as an outstanding teammate in rugby and football.

Connor Stevenson in football gear. Stevenson was killed on April 14, 2015. 

Back in April 2015, when Stevenson’s accused killer first appeared in court, the slain teen’s mother, Laurie Beaudoin, confronted Dubois’s family outside, screaming: “Your son took my son!”

Her emotions were running high after just burying her only son. The grieving mother sat in the front bench in court and when Dubois appeared, she told the Citizen that she didn’t recognize the young man accused of killing her son. 

Beaudoin said her son was always at her side, and denied police allegations that he was involved in the drug trade.

“He was a good son. The kids were always at my house so I knew what they were doing,” she said at the time.

Dubois, who has pleaded not guilty, is expected to go on trial in September.

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In a horrifying case that has shaken bar staff in the ByWard Market, an Ottawa drug dealer is on trial for the drugging and raping of 15 women who were videotaped and photographed as they were exploited.

The accused serial rapist — Phillip Wilson, 33, — is on trial for 45 criminal charges, including sexual assault, aggravated assault and administering a noxious drug. Most of his alleged victims were unconscious and have no memory of the sex attacks.

Wilson is alleged to have preyed on bar staff, usually when they showed up to his apartment after their shifts to buy drugs, according to the Crown theory. He slipped GHB in their drinks, rendering them incapacitated, court heard.

The accused rapist’s onetime girlfriend assisted him, then later curved the truth in police interviews, according to the Crown. The girlfriend’s credibility is a key issue at trial for both Assistant Crown Attorney Meaghan Cunningham and defence lawyer Trevor Brown. 

In court filings, the Crown says the witness was in the grip of Wilson, who “abused her physically, sexually and psychologically. … (her) evidence cannot be properly assessed without understanding the dynamics at play in the abusive relationship between her and Mr. Wilson.”

The girlfriend is not just a key witness, but the reason the Ottawa police cracked the case.

On March 11, 2015, around 2:30 a.m., a neighbour called 911 to report a domestic dispute in the apartment above hers on Nelson Street.

Wilson’s pregnant girlfriend was found bloodied, bruised and unconscious. She was hospitalized for several injuries, including a fractured vertebra. She lost the baby the next day. 

Wilson was arrested on scene and Ottawa police found large quantities of drugs in his apartment — including cocaine, GHB and ketamine.

In an authorized search of Wilson’s apartment, police also seized his electronic devices and found sexually explicit photos and videos of his alleged victims.

The bar-staff drug rapes are alleged to have happened in 2014 and 2015, with many complainants reporting that they took sips from a drink at Wilson’s apartment then blacked out.

One complainant took the stand Tuesday, saying she had gone to Wilson’s to buy cocaine. She did a line with Wilson and when she asked for a drink, he gave her one laced with GHB, court heard.

She took one sip. It tasted salty, she said.

“I remember saying I feel really heavy, and that was it,” she testified Tuesday. 

She woke up the next morning, naked on Wilson’s kitchen floor.

Wilson’s girlfriend handed her her freshly washed-and-dried jean shorts, she told court.

She later got a text with a picture that showed her passed out and half-naked. A friend of hers told her to go to the police, but she said she didn’t want to “create a kerfuffle” and wanted to instead put it out of her mind, and “forget about it.” So much so that she deleted the photograph. She also told court that she felt alone and didn’t know there were other alleged victims. 

Other alleged victims, also unconscious, were videotaped and photographed with the accused performing sexual acts on them, according to court filings.

Wilson is in custody and has pleaded not guilty to the slew of charges. The trial, with Ontario Superior Court Justice Charles Hackland presiding, continues Wednesday when more complainants are expected to testify at the Elgin Street courthouse.

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Sam Tsega, convicted in the 2010 execution-style killing of Barrhaven teen Michael Swan, has been freed on bail less than two months after he was sentenced to prison, and now lives 800 metres down the road from the home of his victim’s parents. 

Tsega, 25, was sentenced to nine years in April for his key role in the deadly home invasion, and on Wednesday was freed on bail by appeal court Justice Janet Simmons, who let him out of prison despite Crown concerns for public safety. 

The judge’s decision to free Tsega while he awaits an appeal of conviction has devastated his victim’s family. Swan’s parents sat, pained, at every court appearance over seven years until all of their son’s killers were convicted. They felt as if they didn’t have a voice in court, and noted that their son’s life story was barely a footnote in the lengthy trials.

Swan’s brother, Alex, condemned the justice system: “I have officially lost all respect and confidence I once had for the so-called justice system in Canada after seven plus years of trials and appeals … once again Sam Tsega is a free man and ultimately justice has not been served, he told the Citizen. “If not for Sam Tsega, my brother would still be alive today … I am shocked and appalled that a convicted killer is now living as a free man, mere steps away from Michael’s childhood home. It is beyond insulting that my parents still have to live in fear and cannot find closure.”

Michael Swan died after being shot in the back during a 2010 home invasion.

Swan, 19, was shot in the back after being forced to his knees at gunpoint by three masked intruders from Toronto. The Barrhaven teen, a popular athlete, was executed in his bedroom over a bag of weed, some money and NHL video games in what trial judge Ontario Superior Court Justice Catherine Aitken said was a “tragic and senseless” killing driven by greed.

It was Tsega who conspired with a group of friends, known as the Toronto 3 and all since convicted of murder. Tsega wasn’t at the home invasion, but he helped plan it, giving the trio Swan’s address, the layout of the house and the masks used in the botched robbery. Tsega even billed his onetime friend as an easy target, the court had heard.

Tsega had originally been on trial for second-degree murder, but the judge spared him a murder conviction and instead found him guilty of manslaughter. The judge said the Crown had failed to prove an essential element of second-degree murder, namely that Tsega, who was not at the scene of the crime, knew the robbery plot would end in murder.

It was just after midnight on Feb. 2, 2010, when three masked men, dressed in black with handguns drawn, stormed Swan’s home and forced him and his friends to their knees at gunpoint, court heard. They demanded to know where he kept his dope and money, but Swan wouldn’t give it up. He even refused after they pressed a gun into his back.

“I don’t know,” Swan told them.

Those were his last words.

They shot him. The bullet pierced his heart. He was dead in less than a minute.

They then ransacked the home and stole weed, money and video games. 

In sentencing Tsega to nine years in prison, Aitken said he didn’t have the foresight to know someone would end up dead. The judge called him a young, naive man who made a foolish decision, but reminded the court: “But for Tsega, this home invasion and killing would never have occurred. … He got the ball rolling by giving the information and had the power to put the brakes on the operation.

“It was a tragic and senseless killing that has forever changed the fabric of the Barrhaven community.”

The bail ruling comes after years of legal proceedings for Swan’s family and friends. His parents withstood a long trip through the criminal justice system, sitting quietly in court across four convictions, and listening to horrifying details about their son’s last moments. At best, they say, they felt like spectators, victimized by it all.

“You have been living a parent’s worst nightmare for the last seven years,” Aitken said.

The judge said the justice system failed the Swans by taking so long to prosecute the young men who killed their son, and she blamed the delays on the complexity of the evidence, a lack of resources, and decisions by both the Crown and defence lawyers.

Tsega, who was expelled from Carleton University after he was charged, was credited with 17 months for pre-trial custody.

According to his bail conditions, Tsega has to live at his mother’s home, just down the road from the home of his victim’s parents, surrender his passport and abide by a curfew. He has been released on a $72,000 bond, pledged by his mother ($50,000), his brother ($10,000), girlfriend ($2,000) and family friend ($10,000).

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Ottawa’s Omar Anwar won bail on Friday after being arrested on charges that he impersonated a dentist and forged medical school records in a failed bid to take dental exams at McGill University in May.

This type of alleged identity fraud is so rare that the National Dental Examining Board of Canada (NDEB) said it has seen it only twice in the past two decades.

Police said Anwar, 29, worked as a dental assistant at two Ottawa clinics. 

The criminal investigation began after the NDEB called Ottawa police saying someone had attempted to take dental exams on May 27-28 with falsified credentials. In order to write the exam, applicants must have a degree from an accredited dental school.

The investigation revealed that Anwar allegedly accessed the University of Minnesota credentials of a real dentist and then applied online to take the dental exams. (Anwar is also charged with uttering a forged document.)

A handcuffed Anwar appeared in court on Friday and won bail right away.

His defence lawyer, Paolo Giancaterino, said his client is looking forward to telling his side of the story.

Anwar was released on conditions that he live at his family home in Alta Vista and that he not work at dental clinics. 

The reputed imposter is also charged with false pretense for landing those jobs, police said. He was also charged with uttering forged documents for a series of alleged fake resumés.

An Ottawa police detective said that, had the investigation revealed the accused actually worked as a dental hygienist or dentist, he would have been charged with assault.

While the accused fraudster never worked as a dentist, he portrayed himself as one in online profiles, including one that said he was a specialist.

There are numerous selfies — some with him posing with leased luxury cars, including a Lamborghini he named “Ava” — on his Instagram account, where he portrays himself as a dental surgeon, posting an image of a T-shirt that reads, “I am a Dental Surgeon, do you think a sane person would do this job?” He also suggests in one photo that he was doing surgery on May 5 with hashtags that include #dentist #surgery #hardwork.

His LinkedIn account said he worked as a dental-oral surgeon at Harmony Dentistry from June 2014 to present.

A receptionist at Harmony Dentistry on Cyrville Road was reluctant to speak about Anwar, but confirmed he had worked at the dental clinic for a short period “shadowing” other hygienists and dentists until he “passed his exams.”

Kim Phillips, communications manager with the NDEB, said 900 people write that exam each year, almost always without any red flags going up.

“It’s very unusual, it’s not something we come across very often,” Phillips said. “We do a detailed credential evaluation on all applicants, and I think we’ve seen this two times in the last 20 years.”

She said had Anwar taken the exam and passed with a certificate, he would have had to go through several more steps before he would have been able to practise in a specific province.

Anwar lists several institutions on his LinkedIn account (which, along with his other social media accounts, were shut down or made private Friday afternoon) where he obtained degrees, including the University of Calgary where he said he completed a master’s degree in internal medicine in 2011; and a health sciences degree from the University of Ottawa in 2010. The U of O could only confirm that a student by the same name completed an Honours Bachelor in Health Sciences (BHSc) in 2011. 

His home address is listed in Alta Vista. On Friday afternoon, his mother answered the phone. When asked if he was a dentist, she said, “Yes.” Asked where he went to dental school, she said, “Spain.” After further questions, she said, “Do you mind if he calls you? I’m not doing well right now.”

Organized fraud investigators would like to hear from anyone who believes they received dental care from Anwar. Anyone with information was asked to call 613-236-1222, ext. 5292.

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Broke and hungry, suspected Ottawa terrorist Tevis Gonyou-McLean is accused of stealing groceries in Westboro. 

Gonyou-McLean, 25, was charged with theft and breaching his terrorism peace bond after allegedly pinching a gaggle of food items on May 30. He’s accused of stealing cheese, yogurt, chicken, sushi, ice cream, chips and Pepsi from a grocery store. 

This is the latest in a series of breaches by Gonyou-McLean, who has run afoul of release conditions multiple times since his original arrest in August of 2016. 

At that time, he was nabbed by the RCMP on fears that he would engage in terrorism. Ultimately, he was charged with uttering threats but was not charged with any terrorism offences. He was eventually granted bail and released on a terrorism peace bond with strict conditions, including requiring him to wear a GPS ankle bracelet.

The threat Gonyou-McLean allegedly made was that he would avenge the 2016 death of ISIL supporter Aaron Driver, who was killed in a confrontation with police in Strathroy, Ont.

But federal prosecutors dropped the uttering-threats case against Gonyou-McLean and formally stayed the charge in January. The RCMP’s terrorism case was anchored in secretly recorded conversations that Gonyou-McLean had with his mom, who reported to the Mounties that her son was going to exact revenge. But while his mother gave the RCMP the recorded conversations, the alleged threat was not actually captured on tape.

Since Gonyou-McLean was released on bail, his conditions have proved, at times, unbearable — leading to trouble with the law. One time, he smashed his ankle bracelet and another time, in November, he slipped out of the GPS device and was arrested hours later. 

Off and on, since his original arrest, he’s spent 70 days in jail for breaching conditions. And his time in jail has not been without incident. While at the Ottawa-Carleton Detention Centre, he was housed with a 350-pound inmate who beat him up after his cherry-flavoured Twizzler Nibs went missing. Gonyou-McLean denied stealing the candy.

Following the recent theft charge, Gonyou-McLean is out on bail again and not jailed at the OCDC. The conditions of his latest bail release have been amended to give him a later curfew to accommodate Ramadan prayer schedules.

Other conditions remain the same, including forbidding him from communicating with convicted Ottawa terror twins Ashton and Carlos Larmond. Gonyou-McLean says he went to Rideau High School with them but hasn’t seen them since. His conditions also say he can’t access or view materials from any listed terrorist group, and must not possess any objects with an Islamic State logo.

Gonyou-McLean, who is a Muslim convert, has told the Citizen he’s being persecuted for simply exploring Islam.

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An Ottawa drug dealer accused of drugging, raping and videotaping more than a dozen women — mostly ByWard Market bar staff — took the stand in his own defence on Thursday and was quick to cry as he portrayed himself as a victim the night he was arrested on charges of beating his pregnant girlfriend.

She lost the baby the day after his arrest.

Phillip Wilson, 33, was arrested on March 11, 2015 after a neighbour reported what sounded like a domestic dispute in the upstairs Nelson Street apartment. Ottawa police found Wilson’s pregnant girlfriend bloodied, bruised and unconscious. She was hospitalized for several injuries, including a fractured vertebra.

On the stand under examination-in-chief by defence lawyer Trevor Brown, Wilson denied beating his pregnant girlfriend for stealing cocaine from his safe. He denied kicking her in the stomach and testified that, on the night in question, he came home and found his girlfriend unconscious on the bed. He said he yelled for her to wake up, and yanked at her arm, and then tried to stand her up, and that’s when he claimed she fell and hit her head on the dresser. The former Carleton Ravens basketball player (he was kicked off the team for smoking weed in a stairwell at the university) testified that he wasn’t quick enough to catch her fall.

He explained away her severe injuries as coming from an accidental fall, and said he feared she had done too much cocaine. He also said he was worried about the baby’s health but didn’t call an ambulance for fear child-protection workers would seize the baby at birth.

When the police arrived, he said he asked them if they had a warrant and didn’t want to let them in for fear they’d find his drug supply, including large quantities of GHB, cocaine and ketamine. He also said he had to plead for an officer to check on his unconscious girlfriend in the bedroom. (His version is at odds with the police account, which states an officer raced to check on the girlfriend because it was called in as a domestic.)

In Wilson’s words, he freaked out when officers tried to arrest him and that police hit him to try to restrain him. It wasn’t until a fourth officer arrived — someone he knew — that he agreed to stop resisting. “I didn’t do anything wrong,” he recalled telling the officers.

Police seized his electronic devices and found sexually explicit photos and videos of his alleged unconscious victims.

The bar-staff drug rapes are alleged to have happened in 2014 and 2015, with many complainants reporting that they took sips from a drink at Wilson’s apartment and then blacked out. Most of the complainants have no memory of the sex attacks.

The case is anchored in key evidence from Wilson’s phone, used to videotape and photograph the alleged victims as they were exploited.

In a case that has shaken bar staff in the Market, Wilson is on is on trial for 45 criminal charges, including sexual assault, aggravated assault and administering a noxious drug. 

Wilson preyed on bar staff, usually when they showed up to his apartment after their shifts to buy drugs, according to the Crown theory. He slipped GHB in their drinks, rendering them incapacitated, court heard.

Wilson denied ever administering drugs to incapacitate women to have sex with them, and when questioned about one alleged victim, testified that it was consensual, saying she was awake on the bed and “talking dirty.”

Wilson testified that he used cocaine and GHB together because it was a “pretty fun high.”

Wilson, who said he bounced around foster homes, and said his mother is from Jamaica and that he thinks his father lives in Nigeria, has pleaded not guilty to the 45 charges.

The trial continues Friday at the Elgin Street courthouse with Ontario Superior Court Justice Charles Hackland presiding. 

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In the face of graphic video and photo evidence of him exploiting drugged-out women, Phillip Wilson finally said it was wrong.

The Ottawa drug dealer accused of drugging, raping and videotaping more than a dozen women testified on Monday that it was “morally” wrong to exploit one of the alleged victims after the court played a video of him sexually touching her when she was severely drugged. 

Asked by his lawyer Trevor Brown to explain why he did, Wilson, 33, told court: “I was completely under the influence of a lot of drugs. I’m very disappointed in myself … It’s wrong. Morally, it’s not right.”

At his judge-alone trial, the accused serial rapist was also shown another of his cellphone videos, this one with him exploiting another drugged-out woman. The woman is heard coughing. “She could have possibly been choking, I’m not too sure,” Wilson said.

One thing he was clear on was that, after reviewing the video in court, he admitted that the alleged victim was in no state to consent. Reviewing the video with a “sober and clear head,” Wilson testified: “I don’t believe she was able to consent.”

“Again, at the time, I was pretty intoxicated with drugs and alcohol,” Wilson told court.

Wilson said he was “overstepping my limit.”

“Now, looking at this (video), I am disappointed and embarrassed. I regret my actions,” Wilson told court.

The drug rapes are alleged to have happened in 2014 and 2015, with many complainants reporting that they took sips from a drink at Wilson’s apartment and then blacked out. Most of the complainants have no memory of the alleged attacks.

The case is anchored in key evidence from Wilson’s phone, used to videotape and photograph the alleged victims as they were exploited.

In a case that has shaken bar staff in the ByWard Market, Wilson is on trial for 45 criminal charges, including sexual assault, aggravated assault and administering a noxious drug. 

Wilson preyed on bar staff, usually when they showed up to his apartment after their shifts to buy drugs, according to the Crown theory. He allegedly slipped GHB in their drinks, rendering them incapacitated, court heard.

Wilson denied ever administering drugs to incapacitate women to have sex with them.

He has pleaded not guilty to the 45 charges.

The trial continues Tuesday at the Elgin Street courthouse with Ontario Superior Court Justice Charles Hackland presiding. 

The fast-money life for an Ottawa couple has come to an abrupt end, with the freshly-engaged lovers off to prison for supplying the street with hard drugs, including deadly fentanyl.

Joshua Eyamie-Binks, 31, and Cortney Rattray-Johnson, 27, dabbed at tears as they pleaded guilty to drug trafficking and possession of all the restricted guns that went hand-in-hand with their hard-drug business.

They expressed remorse and have announced plans to get married once released from prison.

Eyamie-Binks was sentenced earlier this week to 10 years in prison, and his fiancée, Rattray-Johnson, is scheduled to be sentenced later this summer to eight years.

Ontario Court Justice Ann Alder told court that fentanyl is a type of “deadly weapon” and hopes that the federal sentences will send a clear message to other hard-drug dealers.

The judge noted that the couple was running an outlawed drug store, selling “some of the most dangerous and deadly drugs we have on our streets today.”

That the drug-dealing couple had guns (semi-automatic assault rifle, two 12-gauge shotguns, a 9mm semi-automatic handgun, a Smith & Wesson .357 revolver, and a Glock .40) made for a “lethal combination,” the judge said. 

Items seized by the police following their investigation of Eyamie-Binks and Rattray-Johnson. 

Eyamie-Binks, a father of three young children, stood in the prisoner’s box and said:

“I just want to say I know I messed up and I’m taking responsibility for it. I plan on changing my life after this. I’m sorry for putting my family through this. I really don’t know what to say. I hope I didn’t hurt anybody.”

The judge later noted otherwise.

“Of course you did (hurt people), it may have not been your intention, and maybe you didn’t think it through. You were selling drugs to people who wanted it and you were making money, but I can guarantee that you did hurt many, many people.”

Ottawa police targeted the couple after they got a tip in September 2016 that they were trafficking large quantities of fentanyl, drug of death. The police investigation, praised by the judge, was exhaustive and included video surveillance that captured the couple, red-handed, moving bags of drugs and guns from stash rooms. Police also planted tracking devices on Eyamie-Binks car showing him moving drugs, guns and money from a stash house to a storage locker.

The police investigation culminated on February 16 when police executed 11 search warrants — five homes, one storage locker, and five vehicles — and seized a large quantity of hard drugs, several firearms and $136,000 found hidden throughout one of the homes.

The police seized 19.17 grams of straight powdered fentanyl. It might not look like a lot on paper, but it is. 

According to Ottawa police drug unit Staff Sgt. Rick Carey, 19 grams of straight fentanyl powder (in a laboratory setting) could translate to about 52,000 microgram doses.

Cortney Rattray-Johnson outside the Ottawa courthouse on Thursday, June 22, 2017.

“That’s what makes … fentanyl so dangerous on the streets. It’s not being processed in a laboratory. Some guy decides to mix it in a blender in his basement and you have no idea how much is contained in any one dose. It takes so little to actually cause an overdose,” Carey said in a statement to the Citizen.

Ottawa police test results of the drugs seized in this case showed that heroin had been cut with fentanyl and some of the seized cocaine had traces of the killer drug. 

The judge said Eyamie-Binks and Rattray-Johnson would have got more time had they not pleaded guilty early in the face of what she called a strong police case. The judge noted that they saved court costs by pleading guilty.

“I hope this does send a message to others that taking responsibility early on for their actions will help them in the long run in their sentence and more importantly assist in the administration of justice and the community at large,” Alder said.

It should be noted that in this case, that of all the hard drugs seized, police did not find any counterfeit pills — contrary to media reports at the time of their arrest.

The couple was supported by friends and family at the court hearing.

“I really screwed up this time,” said Rattray-Johnson, a hairdresser, after she pleaded guilty. “I went down the wrong path and now it’s time for a total overhaul of my life.”

She also said her fiancé is the “best man I’ve ever met.”

Hard drugs seized by police in the bust included fentanyl, meth, MDMA, morphine, bath salts, hydromorpone, heroin, cocaine, ketamine, and xanax.

Eyamie-Binks, the ringleader of the drug operation, says he has hopes of opening a bistro and making an honest living once released from prison. Several others arrested in the bust are awaiting court dates.

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For seven weeks, the jury in the first-degree murder trial of Michael Belleus has explored the city’s underworld of feuding crack dealers in what’s been referred to as the drug game, in which most players either get killed or end up in prison.

On Monday, defence lawyer Anne London-Weinstein did her best to keep Belleus, 25, out of prison for the 2012 drive-by killing of rival crack dealer Levy Kasende, 22.

She attacked the circumstantial murder case, saying the killing had not been planned, and pinning it on another man.

The lawyer reminded the jury that no one actually identified Belleus as the shooter, and that there were three black men in the Mazda minivan that pulled up outside a townhouse in Blackburn Hamlet on the night in question. According to witnesses, the driver’s side window lowered and the flash of a gun was all they saw. Kasende was shot in the right thigh, and in the back, that bullet piercing his heart. But nobody got a look at the shooter, making it a straight identification case that is expected to go to the jury Tuesday after Ontario Superior Court Justice Kevin Phillips provides instructions.

Mike Belleus

In urging the jury to find Belleus guilty in the first degree, assistant Crown attorney Fara Rupert said the accused had a clear motive, and noted that he was the one who had borrowed the minivan, which was found engulfed in flames on a country road minutes after the killing.

This key detail in the circumstantial case is anchored in a voice from the grave. Before dying of cancer, one of the accused killer’s crack customers came forward to police, saying he finally wanted to tell the truth. He had loaned Belleus his minivan, he confessed. He had originally told detectives he didn’t know anything about it and that he might have lost the keys to his minivan, the jury heard. The crack addict said he wanted to tell the truth straight away but that he was too afraid. (The defence noted the minivan was such an obvious link back to Belleus that it bolstered the more likely scenario that the shooting had not been planned.)

The prosecutor told the jury that not only was the drive-by shooting planned by its very nature, but also because Belleus borrowed someone else’s van. She also told the jury that Belleus tried to cover his tracks by destroying the van and fleeing to Montreal. Rupert also used Belleus’s own words against him, through a series of texts, to suggest that he was willing to pay $2,000 if someone could lead him to his target. Belleus also discouraged others from co-operating with police, and once tried, unsuccessfully, to stop a witness from doing an interview. 

The prosecutor acknowledged that it’s a circumstantial case and asked the jury not to look at the evidence in isolation, telling them the significance of each “piece” cannot be known until they see the “the entire puzzle.”

The prosecutor called the drive-by shooting nothing short of a “targeted execution.”

London-Weinstein said it was anything but and cautioned the jury not to look back at the circumstantial evidence through the prism of time, in which, she said, people have the tendency to “try to make all the pieces of the puzzle fit. … You don’t have all the pieces of the puzzle and you can’t just take the pieces that don’t fit and jam them into available space.”

“I urge you not to reason backwards,” said London-Weinstein, who asked them to find Belleus not guilty.

She also said the killing was more consistent with “impulsive and stupid,” pulled off in “blind panic” after a chance encounter with a rival drug dealer, and noted that it was more likely that one of the accused’s associates squeezed the trigger.

She guided the jury back to a conversation between the accused and an associate. In the conversation, secretly recorded by police, an associate is heard saying that if he’s not scared about the murder investigation, than Belleus certainly has nothing to worry about. The defence lawyer likened this to an admission that another man was the shooter. The jury also heard that two other men were arrested in connection with the killing but were never charged.

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Michael Belleus, just 25, could have done anything with his life but he chose to pick up a gun with an eye to so-called easy money in the city’s deadly crack trade.

And on Wednesday, just as most folks were having supper, it cost him his freedom, after a jury found him guilty in the 2012 drive-by killing of rival crack dealer Levy Kasende, 22.

Moments before condemning the killer to life in prison, Ontario Superior Court Justice Kevin Phillips told court that, of all the testimony across seven weeks, no truer words were spoken than when a witness said the drug game has only two endings: You either end up in prison or you end up dead.

The judge noted their positions in the violent drug trade have likely already been filled by other young men, and he had a sharp warning for them: “To those young men — get out, get out now, before you meet the same fate.”

The jury found Belleus guilty of first-degree murder after hearing a strong, yet circumstantial case presented by assistant Crown attorneys Fara Rupert and Matthew Guigan-Miller.

Nobody got a look at the shooter who fired from the lowered window of a Mazda minivan that pulled up outside a townhouse in Blackburn Hamlet. There was just the flash from a gun. Kasende was shot in the right thigh, and in the back, that bullet piercing his heart. Though it was a straight identification case, it was stacked with a pile of evidence that all led back to Belleus, right down to the fact that he had borrowed the minivan, the one found abandoned and engulfed in flames on a country road minutes after the killing.

The defence, led by Anne London-Weinstein and Neil Weinstein, said the shooting was anything but planned and it was more likely that a Belleus associate squeezed the trigger then claimed that Kasende was the one who was plotting to kill their client.

Levy Kasende, who was shot and killed in 2012.

But the jury didn’t buy it and instead found that the murder was planned and deliberate and that Belleus opened fire in a revenge killing. Belleus was bent on revenge because Kasende has shot him in the arm on Canada Day in 2010 over a drug-turf feud. After Belleus was shot, police tried to interview him as a victim but he refused to co-operate, saying only that he’d deal with it himself.

Belleus was so hungry for revenge, he offered $2,000 on the street for anyone who could tell him where he could find Kasende. 

And on the night he died, Kasende wouldn’t have been hard to find. His girlfriend, and the mother of child, had just moved into Belleus’s “crack territory,” out on Innes Road, and just a few doors down from one of Belleus’s associates. 

In haunting words recalled in court, Kasende himself told friends: “This neighbourhood is going to be the death of me.”

Kasende knew the east-end streets well and knew Belleus was after him. In fact, when he went to visit his girlfriend and child on the night of Aug. 24, he brought a sawed-off shotgun, the one he tucked under the bed just in case.

Levy Kasende had finally embraced his future as a young father but the crack dealer couldn’t escape his past, and it cost him his life. In a victim-impact statement read in court by a prosecutor, the grieving mother of his young child told court that Kasende never got to hear his child’s first word — Dadda — and never got to see them crawl or walk for the first time.

Belleus did not take the stand in his own defence and when asked if he wanted to finally say something, he said: “I’m an innocent man.”

He will be eligible for parole in 25 years. The successful police investigation was led by Det. Chris Benson and Sgt. Darren Vinet and the trial had heavy police security in its final days.

The judge thanked the jury for taking its duty so seriously.

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A convicted killer who spent a staggering 18 months in solitary confinement is suing the Ottawa jail for “degrading and inhuman” treatment that, for a time, cost him his mind, according to a $500,000 lawsuit filed Wednesday.

The case of Mutuir Rehman, first brought to light by the Citizen last year, “epitomizes the reason why the whole system of solitary confinement is under review at the current time,” said his lawyer, Lawrence Greenspon.

Rehman was 22 when he found himself in jail after his arrest on murder charges in the 2013 killing of Andre Boisclair.

He’d had a chaotic childhood. By the age of 10, he was getting high. Once good with numbers, he eventually dropped out of school and started selling crack. But no matter his hardened street life, nothing had prepared him for his time at the jail on Innes Road, where he was shown a solitary confinement cell as punishment for fighting with inmates and guards.

He would spend 23 hours a day for 18 months in isolation at the Ottawa-Carleton Detention Centre, with no access to newspapers, TV or radio. They fed him through a hatch, and beyond the odd 20-minute visit with a relative, he spent his days absent of human interaction.

Rehman started hallucinating in his lonely cell and, in the end, might have lost his mind.

“He looks like he’s losing his brains,” his father, Habib Rehman, told the Citizen at the time.

The lawsuit alleges that nobody at the jail recognized or reported the deteriorating mental health of Rehman, now 24. (It was his then-lawyer Dominic Lamb, alone, who flagged it.)

At the request of Lamb, Rehman was transferred for treatment at Royal Ottawa, where he was diagnosed with an acute episode of schizophrenia. According to a mental status examination at the hospital, Rehman expressed some delusion and smiled and grinned while talking about serious matters such as the murder case against him.

A forensic psychiatrist found Rehman unfit for trial and said his mental health worsened in his 18 months in solitary confinement. 

After being removed from the jail and receiving treatment at the Royal Ottawa Mental Health Centre, Rehman‘s mental state improved enough for him to plead guilty to manslaughter in the 2013 death of ex-con Boisclair. (Rehman was subjected to what the hospital calls chemical restraining, in which patients are restrained and administered drugs to ease aggression.)

His trial lawyer argued that there should be a legal remedy for Rehman’s claimed charter violations while in solitary, but the judge said it was a case for civil court.

And that’s where the case is now.

According to the statement of claim, the jail failed Rehman miserably and:

• Deprived him of his right to life, liberty and security, to be free from arbitrary detention, and the right not to be subjected to cruel and unusual treatment or punishment;
• The jail owed him a duty of care for his mental and physical health while in custody;
• The jail failed to properly monitor damaging effects of solitary confinement;
• The jail failed to have a regular system of assessment of the impact of lengthy solitary confinement; 
• The jail failed to follow, let alone be aware of, internationally recognized and accepted time limits of solitary confinement that say more than 15 days can cause brain damage;
• That he suffered pain, loss of enjoyment of life and extreme psychological harm.

None of the allegations has been proven in court and the Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services has yet to file a statement of defence. Spokesman Brent Ross said it would be inappropriate to comment on a case before the courts.

Rehman’s parents have said they have no family history of mental illness.

The statement of claim is also seeking damages and legal fees. Rehman is now serving eight years at Millhaven Institution, a maximum-security prison in Bath, Ont. 

gdimmock@postmedia.com

www.twitter.com/crimegarden

They had just returned from a round of golf, laid out the appetizers and poured the wine when the doorbell rang.

The young man outside, wearing only underwear, was shivering. He was muddy, his face was bruised and swollen and he stood there crying.

“It certainly looked like he had been beaten. … He was very upset, shivering and shaking,” Donna Amelotte testified on Monday at the kidnapping-and-torture trial of Laura Brahaney 27, and Jake Hopwood, 28.

The young, autistic man had come out of the woods looking for help after a harrowing ordeal that began on Facebook. Two days earlier, on Sept. 4, 2014, he had been lured online with the promise of a hookup with another woman, but when he answered his apartment door, it was Laura Brahaney who was there, according to the Crown.

Brahaney turned back and stepped outside saying she needed to text her mother, court heard.

“In reality, she was turning back to open the (lobby) door for her accomplices. At this point, the trap was sprung,” prosecutor Matthew Geigen-Miller told court.

The man, 25, was beaten, bound, gagged and blindfolded. His Ottawa apartment was looted, taking his TV, his computer — they even stole the vacuum cleaner, Geigen-Miller told court. Then they showed him the backseat of a car and made him rehearse a ransom demand before forcing him to call his father for money from a pay phone out in Cumberland.

(The scenes of the robbery and the ransom call were captured on security video obtained by police. In the footage, someone can be seen lugging out stolen goods from the victim’s apartment.)

The ransom plan quickly failed because it was 4 a.m. and the victim’s father didn’t answer any of the calls, court heard.

According to the Crown, the young man — described by police as child-like — was forced into a dog cage in Brahaney’s basement where he was kept for 24 hours. The dog cage was so small he was unable to stretch, and was denied a washroom.

The Crown alleges that while the victim was still hunched in a cage down in the basement, Brahaney was already on social media plotting her next robbery, this one in Toronto. 

On the way to Toronto, the accused kidnappers are alleged to have pulled over by a wooded area off the highway and close to the St. Lawrence River. Blindfolded and gagged, the victim was taken into the woods and beaten again. One of his kidnappers, court heard, choked him until he was unconscious and left him for dead.

But the young man made it out of the woods, and to safety at a home where longtime friends were getting ready to cap a day of golf with supper.

They first wondered if they should let him in out of fear. But they did and they showed him a chair. (The last time he had been in a chair it was in a basement, and he was tied to it.) They gave the shivering man a blanket and called 911. And then he called his mom.

Supper would never be the same. Donna Amelotte, a nurse, told court that it looked as if the man had burn marks around his ankles and wrists, and said he complained of pain in his neck and face.

Her husband, David Amelotte, also testified, recalling at the judge-alone trial that the man’s face looked severely swollen, and that one of his eyes was closed. The young man was barefoot, dirty and confused, and had marks on his wrist, Amelotte, a business executive, testified.

A police detective who interviewed the victim described him as being “unable to walk.”

Brahaney and Hopwood have pleaded not guilty while two other people pleaded guilty in the kidnapping-and-torture case that continues later this week with Ontario Court Justice Hugh Fraser presiding.

Defence lawyer Michael Smith is representing Brahaney and Leo Russomanno is defending Hopwood.

gdimmock@postmedia.com

http://www.twitter.com/crimegarden