Honour on Trial (14 page)

Koopman zeroed in on the early morning of June 30 when the Shafias exited at Kingston to find a motel for the night. He established once again that Hamed and his father drove away in the Lexus to find a place and that they had three of his younger siblings with them.

Koopman: "Did they park on the side of a road? Did they park in a parking lot? Were they …"

Hamed: "It was, it was in a parking lot, I think. Yeah." He told Koopman that after he and his father checked into the Kingston East, they went back up the road to find his mother and sisters and Rona. But the Nissan was already driving toward them. Hamed couldn't explain how this happened.

Hamed said he was only at the motel five or ten minutes when he decided to leave for Montreal. Mainly he wanted to check on a "building" they owned in the city.

"So how long were you in Montreal before the Lexus hit the rail?" Koopman asked.

"I went home, then, uh, when I had to eat something, I went and got up," he replied. "So if it was five … If I got there at, like, six or five, maybe. Three hours, yeah, five-thirty, six. Then about two hours, I guess."

"OK," said Koopman, "So why wouldn't you have taken the Nissan back to Montreal?"

We don't hear Hamed's response because of a technical problem with the videotaping. Hamed was again asked about the accident with the Lexus in the Montreal supermarket parking lot. Koopman wanted to know how the pieces of Lexus headlight ended up inside the vehicle. Hamed said the Montreal police officer told him to collect them.

It was a meandering interview with Hamed always suggesting Koopman check the cellphone records to more accurately gauge where he was at different times.

"I guess in terms of where we are tonight and why you're sitting here, I just gotta ask, should I believe everything that you've told me tonight?" Koopman said.

"Yeah," Hamed replied. "If it wasn't the truth, I wouldn't tell you, but then if, uh, if you're saying, uh, if you're asking me, like, uh, asking me if you believe me or not, then, you know, it's up to you."

Koopman offered Hamed a chance to tell him anything else he might remember from the night and following morning of June 29-30. Hamed suggested that if Koopman were to give him more of the evidence against them that he could then "correct your mistake."

Koopman excused himself from the room then returned a short while later. He had been conferring with other officers watching the interview. He told Hamed that they had just given him new information and that he was not asking Hamed any longer if he and his parents killed the women — he wanted to know why they did it. Hamed didn't answer. Koopman asked Hamed if his father exerted control over him to help with the murders.

"It's not a question of did it happen, Hamed," said Koopman. "It's a question of why did it go that far?"

Hamed asked for more proof of their guilt. Koopman listed off all the lies he'd caught him in, such as supposedly having stayed in Niagara Falls all five days even though his cell phone registered off a tower near Kingston on June 27. Then he went over the fact that pieces of plastic from the Lexus headlight were found at the lockstation.

"I know," Hamed replied. "I understand that and I know … How are you involving the other two with me?… My question to you is how come my, uh, parents got into this?" Hamed told Koopman that his mother had "nothing to do with it 'cause she was not herself that night. She was really tired. She had no idea where we are and everything."

Koopman told him that she had just told police she heard the splash, "and she's admitting to us that she's seen the car in the water."

"I don't know," Hamed responded. "I don't know about that." He asked Koopman if he could meet with his mother. The officer said no. Hamed said he was perplexed that police could assume all three were involved in a murder if there was no video footage to prove it.

Koopman cut to the chase, telling him to forget about all the other details and tell him why pieces of the Lexus headlight were found at Kingston Mills.

"I don't know," Hamed answered.

"You do know that," said Koopman. "That's an absolutely horrible answer to give to me." He accused Hamed of staging the accident in Montreal to cover up the damage from using the Lexus to bump the Nissan into the locks. He told Hamed that the pieces of plastic were recovered the morning the car was discovered underwater.

Hamed again wanted to know when they were collected.

"What does it matter?" Koopman asked him. Hamed said members of Hussain Hyderi's family had visited Kingston and could have dropped the pieces in the grass. Koopman said again the pieces were collected the morning of June 30 by police when the area was sealed off from the public.

"That piece of [the] Lexus was there because you were there with that vehicle," Koopman said.

Hamed sputtered, saying he had no hope in his life and that "now it's your turn to answer my question."

Koopman corrected him. "You're not in a position to start demanding answers from me," he said. Then he told Hamed how disappointed he was in him.

"Listen, Steve, man," Hamed said, "uh, you know, and I understand what you said. You're, like, this is a serious situation, of course. It's murder. It should be serious for everyone." Hamed suggested police were only acting on information given them by accusing family members.

Koopman said they didn't make arrests based on people's opinions. He accused Hamed of dishonouring his sisters by not telling the truth. Then he left the interview room and Detective Sergeant Mike Boyles, who had been watching the interview, entered the room. He told Hamed he'd been lying to Koopman the whole time and that his mother, meanwhile, had been telling the truth.

"If your mom says all three of you were at the locks … on the night … if she told us you were all there, would that be a lie or the truth?" asked Boyles.

"I don't believe that my mom says this," Hamed replied.

"Well, I'm telling you she said that. I witnessed it with my own eyes," said Boyles.

"Well, if she was there, I don't know, but I wasn't."

Boyles became more assertive, telling Hamed that if he couldn't explain why his phone was in the Kingston area on June 27 in the middle of the vacation, then, "That's your story. That's just perfect." Police would take the information to trial.

Boyles switched to the headlight pieces found at the locks. "Was the headlight smashed when you left at two in the morning?" he asked.

"Uh, just forget about …" said Hamed.

Boyles told Hamed they had been listening to the family's conversations on wiretaps for the past several days.

"Seriously," said Hamed, "you have no idea what you're saying."

Hamed looked at the photographs Boyles had put on the table and became entranced by those showing two of his dead sisters. Boyles asked him again to tell the truth.

"They're your family there, your blood," he said. "And I know, I know they weren't respecting the culture and they weren't respecting tradition."

"No, it was nothing like that," Hamed replied.

Boyles reminded Hamed of all the wiretapped conversations in the van. "These aren't conversations of innocent people," said Boyles. "You guys aren't mastermind criminals, Hamed, do you understand that? You guys aren't hitmen. You guys don't know how to cover your tracks properly. You don't know how to get away with things."

Boyles asked Hamed if he knew anyone who would want to kill his sisters. Hamed said no.

"What do you think happened to them?"

"What I guessed in the first place," said Hamed.

"What was that?"

"Taking the keys and driving," he replied. Hamed continued looking at the photos of his dead sisters after they were taken out of the car, seemingly mesmerized by them.

"Drowning is not a peaceful death, Hamed. Drowning is a horrible way to die. You understand that? It's a horrible way," Boyles said.

Hamed kept saying he wanted to leave. Boyles told him to wait, that they were finding the segment of Tooba's interrogation where she placed all three of them at Kingston Mills the night of the deaths.

During the trial, the courtoom was transfixed by the exchange between this young man and Boyles, the experienced detective who had come in as the "bad cop" to Steve Koopman's "good cop." The pressure on Hamed was intense. Yet he remained defiant. Then, the hushed courtroom watched the video as Boyles took another tack.

"I'm not going to ask you any more questions or anything," he said, "but I want you to know that at some point you're gonna go to trial and you're gonna be in court. And there's gonna be a jury or a judge who's gonna assess what happened … So I guess if you want to just look at the camera, you can look right there and see it — you can't really see it, but it's right there. And you can talk to the jury and you can talk to the judge that'll see this in a year and a half. And you can say your piece and tell them what you think and how you feel. This is your opportunity because you're not gonna get another one. The next time, you'll be in the box and it will be at trial."

Two years and three months later, Hamed would be sitting in the prisoners' box in the courtroom, between his co-accused mother and father, watching Boyles predict the future on the video.

"Whatever I have, I tell in front of the judge at that time," Hamed told his interrogator. But he never did.

Jailhouse confession…

OF all the strange twists and turns the Kingston Mills murder investigation and trial took, none was stranger — or more of a game changer — than the appearance of Moosa Hadi. Hadi was a young man of Afghan origin, studying mining engineering at Queen's University, when he took an interest in the Shafia case. He offered his translation services to Peter Kemp, Mohammad Shafia's defence lawyer from Kingston, not long after the arrests in the summer of 2009. Soon he was doing much more than that. Hadi began visiting Mohammad Shafia at the Quinte Detention Centre where the three accused were being held.

After speaking with Shafia, as well as Tooba, Hadi became convinced that this seemingly devout Muslim man would never hatch a plot to kill his daughters. Although Hadi had been hired by Shafia's lawyer to act as translator, Mohammad Shafia subsequently hired Hadi himself and paid him $4,500 to conduct his own investigation. Hadi asked permission to have access to all the police and Crown evidence to that point in the investigation, in particular the interviews and interrogations with police and the wiretaps — a seemingly outrageous request from someone with no qualifications, but Hadi was handed all the files. This in turn gave Shafia access to the Crown's evidence against him and his family.

Obsessed with his investigation, Hadi came to the conclusion that police were being given the wrong interpretations of the Shafias' statements and their surreptitiously taped conversations. He felt the Crown's case was biased and he convinced Shafia he could help correct this terrible injustice.

On November 7, 2009, Hadi visited Hamed at Quinte. He brought along his laptop computer to record their conversation. "I want to record the things that we are talking about. They will be recorded but they will remain with me only," Hadi says in the interview. They didn't.

Hadi decided that what Hamed told him that day was so favourable to the Shafias' case that police should hear it, too. On November 16, Hadi and his recording appeared in court — not as a witness for Hamed and his parents, but for the Crown, which had subpoenaed him to testify. His testimony and evidence would prove to be more beneficial to the Crown case.

For the first half of the three-hour interview at Quinte, Hadi did most of the talking, disputing the entire case constructed by the police and Crown attorneys. In the wiretaps, for instance, when Shafia was railing against his daughters, Hadi told Hamed that his father was not actually angry with the girls, but angry at their actions. He accused the rcmp's Shahin Mehdizadeh — "this stupid officer," he called him — of bullying Tooba during her interrogation. Hadi played segments of the interrogation for Hamed and analyzed them one by one.

Moosa Hadi proclaimed Hamed to be "100% innocent. The only sin that Hamed has is that after the incident or accident he hasn't declare[d] the truth."

Hamed began to tell his new-found ally a different version of what happened in the early hours of June 30. Hamed said they all drove to the Kingston East Motel that night but, of the four passengers in the Nissan, only Rona went inside. He claimed Geeti was asleep in the car; Zainab and Sahar were awake. Zainab and Sahar were sitting in the Nissan in the parking lot and they turned on the radio. Hamed was sitting next to them in the Lexus. Zainab told him she wanted to "drive the car and just go for a spin" in the parking lot.

"Before this, I think Rona wanted to buy a card to make some phone calls or something, so she also got in the car. She told me that if you want to go, before you go, bring me a card," Hamed recounted. Hamed told Rona that the stores were all closed that time of night. What did Rona do? She insisted they go look for a phone card, even though it was at least 1:30 in the morning and none of the women had a driver's licence. (In his original interview with police, Hamed had said Rona's presence in the Nissan didn't make sense. He said: "She was a person who really thought twice about doing things.")

Hamed said he wanted to get his mother so she could drive them for the phone card. Tooba, of course, was the reason they had stopped in Kingston, claiming to be seriously nauseous and vomiting. Yet Hamed claimed he was going to wake her up to go driving for a phone card in the middle of the night.

Their parents were already asleep, however, so Hamed decided to "let them go by themselves. Yes. After that, when I came, I saw that they had already started the car. So I said, 'I will go with you for a little distance.' I said, 'Be careful, I know you haven't driven much. Pay attention not to hit anything. Drive slowly, slowly, I will be following you.'"

In this new scenario, the Nissan headed onto Highway 15 and went north toward Highway 401, also in the direction of Kingston Mills, with Hamed following in the Lexus. They crossed over Highway 401 and stopped at one of the gas stations at the hamlet of Codes Corners. Hamed pulled up beside them and told them he knew it would be closed. He urged them to turn back to the motel. But they didn't. Instead, Zainab took the car onto the Kingston Mills Road and Hamed followed again.