Honour on Trial (15 page)

At the Mills, said Hamed, "I hit the back [of the Nissan] but not hard, just the glass was broken, the glass of Lexus car." He described a scene of some confusion with the occupants of the Nissan saying they would try to make a U-turn to head back where they had come from. They got stuck. Then "she," one of the women in the Nissan, told Hamed she couldn't make the turn.

Hamed and Hadi drew a map to indicate precisely where everyone was located. "Yeah, here or somewhere like this, I saw them for the last time," he said. "Before this, my mind was occupied over the damage."

By this time, Hamed claimed he was out of the Lexus, picking up pieces of broken headlight from the road.

"Yes. I had them in my hand when I heard the splash."

Hamed said he went to where he could still see a glow from the Nissan's headlights underwater — even though the evidence showed that when the car was found, the engine was turned off and so were the headlights. He said he put the pieces of headlight down near the lock "then went to get a rope … I took it from the car and wanted to go inside to [get] them out."

By now, Hamed was familiar with all the police evidence, particularly their interview with a young boy who happened to be out on the deck of his house that night.

"Yeah, yeah, before that, the boy says, 'I heard a horn sound' right?" he asked Hadi. "I sounded the horn a bit to see if there was anyone … He says that he heard it for five seconds. I sounded it once. I realized that there was nobody there." Hadi asked again how many times he sounded the horn, as if prompting him to change his answer.

"Yeah. Twice, twice I did once, twice," he now said. "The area looked like a forest. It was very dark. I couldn't see through very well so I came here. When I came here I … thought when I sounded the horn, [I] wished someone [would] come, or my sister who, if she is out of the car [i.e., not in the car], comes … One of them was out of the car … When I came and sat here, I put the rope but could not see anything."

Hamed's recollections became confusing at this point. "One of them got out," he said. Hadi asked which sister got out of the car. "I think it was Sahar. Sahar got out once."

This appeared to be a reference to some action prior to the car's going into the water. That, he said, was why he was thinking Sahar was not in the car. Hadi asked who was driving when the Nissan went into the water. Zainab was driving at first, Hamed said, but she may have switched with Sahar.

"They rolled the window down a bit, rolled down the window a bit," Hamed said, possibly in an effort to include that piece of known evidence in his testimony. Now he was more convinced that Sahar was driving the car when it went into the water.

Police would later reveal that Geeti was closest to the driver's seat with Zainab beside her in the front. Sahar was in the back with Rona.

"She switched with her," Hamed continued. "When I heard the sound there, I left all those and came here and sounded [the] horn a couple of times, and no one was there so I went back. I put the rope a few times in the water."

"Okay," prompted Hadi. "You put the rope into the water?"

"I put it into the water. Nothing happened … I fold[ed] the rope back where [I] put it … I fold and came back … this way, came back and sat in the car." He said he called helplessly from atop the lock "but they were not responding."

"You were probably shaking the rope as well?" Hadi suggested, clearly prompting Hamed again.

"Yes, it was like that," agreed Hamed. "I moved it a little bit to see if they take it."

Despite the confusion and unfolding tragedy, Hamed also managed to go "back to the car with those pieces" of headlight he had set down at the side of the lock. Hamed estimated the time from when he heard the splash to when he went to sit in the Lexus to be 15 minutes.

"Okay, then you got back to the Lexus car," Hadi continued.

"Yes," said Hamed, "and then drove towards Montreal."

Then Hadi moved into damage control with his questioning, asking Hamed if at this point he thought about calling police to report what had happened. Yes, he thought about it, but decided not to.

"First, I thought that if I call the police, they would blame me that she didn't have a licence and [I had] brought her here," he said. Hamed said he drove away, then stopped briefly to think.

"I was thinking to call someone to come and help them, to come and help them. Nothing else came to my mind, such as …"

"Like you will be charged with murder," Hadi interjected, again prompting Hamed.

"Yes, yeah. Just to find someone to give them help, but when I realized that [a] few minutes had passed, I was scared, so [I] turned the car and went towards Montreal."

As the interview continued, Hamed also had an explanation for the shards of headlight found at the lockstation. He dropped some of them in the confusion. Arriving in Montreal, Hamed said he was tortured about what to tell his parents. He admitted taking the Lexus to the supermarket lot to fake an accident. Then he received two phone calls from his father in Kingston, the second one informing him that the Nissan and the women were not at the motel.

When Hamed finally decided to tell his parents what really happened that night "there wasn't any opportunity to inform them." Hamed said he was worried about his father's reaction. "He might have become very upset," he said. "He would have sworn. He would have lost his temper badly as why they have gone with the car without permission."

Hamed decided to withhold his information and "disclose it to the judge" when they went to trial.

"Okay, so what made you say it now?" Hadi asked.

"Because you told me that now it's the time and don't waste the time of the court," said Hamed.

Hadi said that withholding this information from his parents caused them to suffer greatly in jail, accused of multiple murders, while his younger siblings were placed in protection. He urged Hamed to tell the truth about what really happened.

"I will talk with the lawyer and tell him the story," said Hamed. "I will tell him that to tell the Crown, too."

Hadi was relieved, believing Hamed's story would exonerate him. He hoped, in fact, that their conversation was being recorded by jail authorities. If not, he said, "I will reveal it." Which he did to Kingston Police when he turned over recordings of the conversation.

The trial…

JURY selection for the Kingston Mills murder trial began on the morning of October 11, 2011. Ontario Superior Court Justice Robert Maranger had been selected as the presiding judge. Maranger, with his attention to detail, patience, and good humour, would turn out to be the perfect choice to guide this complicated trial.

Canadian jury trials require 12 jurors, as well as two alternates who are dismissed once the trial begins. The 14th and final person was selected on the afternoon of October 13 — seven men and seven women — as the three accused watched the Canadian justice system unfold from their seats in the glass prisoners' box.

The Crown attorneys on the case, Laurie Lacelle and Gerard Laarhuis, signalled loud and clear that while this was a quadruple murder trial — with Tooba Mohammad Yahya, Mohammad Shafia, and Hamed Shafia each charged with four counts of murder — the killings were motivated by honour based on cultural influences the elder Shafias had brought with them from the Greater Middle East.

Each of the accused had their own lawyer. Mohammad Shafia would be represented by Kingston attorney Peter Kemp. Tooba had also selected a Kingston lawyer, David Crowe. Several months before the trial began, Hamed changed lawyers, hiring Patrick McCann from Ottawa.

During pre-trial motions, McCann would take exception to the Crown's plan to call University of Toronto professor Shahrzad Mojab as an expert on Middle Eastern honour killings. The Crown had crucial evidence from the wiretaps in the family van in which Shafia calls his daughters "whores," declaring that "there is no value in life without honour." The Crown needed someone like Mojab to help put the remarks into cultural context — essentially to show that the family's honour had been stained by the girls' relationships with boys, and that they had to be killed to cleanse that dishonour. In the end, Maranger allowed Mojab to testify.

Other ground rules were established for the coming months of the trial. Media were not to transmit stories from the courtroom using social media. The identities of the three surviving children and their images were not to appear in any stories or broadcasts. And at one point in the proceedings, the entire court would be transported to Kingston Mills so the jurors could see firsthand the place where the bodies were discovered and where the Crown alleged an appalling set of murders had been committed.

Daily workings of the court depended on the smooth running of the translation services. Each day, three interpreters at the trial translated from Farsi to English and English to Farsi, depending on who was speaking at the time. At various points during the trial, French and Spanish were being translated simultaneously into Farsi and English. Headsets provided in the court were an absolute essential for following the proceedings. In the end, the interpreters' fees totalled $298,000. Upgrades to the courtroom and courthouse, including the multilingual interpretation booths, the prisoners' box large enough to hold the three accused, and the new audio-visual system cost $216,000. This was a high-profile case and everything had to be functioning perfectly.

The trial opened the morning of October 20, 2011. Dozens of members of the public and representatives from a dozen or more newspapers, magazines, television, and radio queued up to get into the main courtroom. About half an hour before the scheduled 10 am start, Crown attorney Gerard Laarhuis strode across the upstairs foyer between the courtroom and the Crown's offices. Wished good luck by a bystander, Laarhuis turned and said, "We don't need luck, we need justice."

The long-awaited trial got off to a shaky start. As the 12 jurors walked into the courtroom, one man stood out because of the white Toronto Maple Leafs hockey jersey he was wearing. He stood to address the judge.

"The stress is just killing me," the man said.

"That's good enough for me," replied the judge, dismissing him from duty. The female alternate was then added to the official jury of 12, tipping the balance to seven women and five men. The second alternate was also sent home and Maranger gave the jurors their instructions for the trial.

Then Crown attorney Laurie Lacelle positioned a lectern in front of the jury, laid out the pages with her opening remarks, and launched into a detailed explanation of the case that was succinct and disturbing in its description of what she called "the planned and pre-meditated murders of their family members."

Lacelle outlined the family's history of moving around the world, what Rona's diary would reveal about life in the home, the physical and mental abuse that occurred, the girls' relationships that got them in trouble with their parents, the school reports, and Zainab's sudden departure from the home.

Then she outlined the facts pointing to a conspiracy to murder: the Google searches, the cellphone records, the late-night encounter at the Kingston East Motel, the police interviews and interrogations, hours of wiretaps, post-mortems on the bodies, the unfolding Kingston Police investigation, and the chilling theory that the car containing the four bodies did not just roll into the canal but was pushed in by someone driving the second family vehicle.

"At the close of the case, after all the evidence has been heard, the Crown will ask you to find Tooba, Shafia, and Hamed guilty of the murders of Rona, Zainab, Sahar, and Geeti," said Lacelle.

Then Laarhuis called the Crown's first witness, Kingston Police forensic identification officer Julia Moore.

Julia Moore was the police photographer of record at Kingston Mills on June 30, 2009. On her photographic tour of the Mills, she came across the three shards of plastic in the grass on the opposite side of the rocky outcrop from the lock itself. Moore photographed a black scuff mark on the side of the curb along Kingston Mills Road. She found another five pieces of plastic at the side of the lock, where the car appeared to have entered the water, and photographed them. There were also the two plastic letters, an S and an E. At the edge of the lock, Moore took pictures of striations that appeared to be freshly cut into the stone wall. The locks along the Rideau Canal were made of hand-carved stone brought from nearby quarries in the late-1820s.

A series of photos was shown of the black Nissan being hoisted out of the water by a crane. Moore had photographed the back end of the car with the S and E missing from the word "Sentra." Moore testified about the control settings in the car: the headlight switch was off, as was the wiper switch; the key was in the ignition but in the off setting; the car was in the lowest gear; the ceiling light switch was off — and, perhaps oddest of all, the two front seats were reclined far back.

Reconstruction…

THE physical evidence gathered from the cars was crucial. Constable Chris Prent, a collision reconstruction expert with the Ontario Provincial Police, was brought onto the case in September of 2009 to recreate what happened at the locks the night of June 29-30, and conducted a careful examination of the two Shafia vehicles. With Gananoque Police constable Gordon Boulton, a licensed mechanic, Prent went to see both vehicles at the Kingston Police station.

They took the wheels off the Nissan and found the brakes in good working order. They checked the throttle. Both vehicles were mechanically sound. Prent noted the other irregularities about how the Nissan was found — the headlights off, no one wearing seatbelts, the ignition off, and the car in the lowest gear.

The reclined seats, he said, would have made it "unnatural to be operating this motor vehicle." Prent turned his attention to the vehicles in relation to the physical layout at Kingston Mills. Even though the Nissan was facing back towards the edge it had fallen over, he decided the car had gone in head first. He determined that, from the scrapes on the left side of the Nissan, the car had gotten hung up on the wooden step attached to the lock gate. (This was probably because the car had front-wheel drive, which meant it needed traction to keep moving.) "When it resisted the step, it resisted forward motion and got hung up," Prent said.