Honour on Trial (5 page)

Through the interpreter, Shafia told him: "He went in order to go to work the next day. Meaning, if this incident hadn't happened, he would not have come [back]. Do you understand, miss? If this incident hadn't happened, I wouldn't have asked Hamed to come here. I would've called him a few days later and asked him to pick us up then."

When questioned later by Dempster, Hamed would say he went to Montreal because he forgot his laptop, and returned to Kingston in the minivan because the Lexus "takes more gas and fuel and stuff like that."

Koopman asked Shafia if he and Hamed had spoken the previous night about the Lexus and the minivan. Shafia said he didn't even think about the vehicles because of his family's grief. "They didn't eat so we went to eat at McDonald's. My wife was crying and [I tried to] comfort her, [saying]: 'Now it's happened. God's brought it. What are you doing? [If you] are crying, the other kids will start to cry, and we might lose them, too.' We talked about this and nothing else."

Koopman asked about any damage that he may have seen on the Lexus before Hamed took it to Montreal. "No, I didn't see anything because the car was in good shape when it left and came back," Shafia responded.

Then he recalled something. "Although in Niagara," Shafia said, "Zainab, with this black car [the Nissan]… I was outside [the car]… it hit [the Lexus] a little bit but it didn't get scratched… it didn't get scratched. Zainab was coming back, reverse coming." This was another reference to what would be a recurring theme about Zainab's always wanting to drive and sneaking the car keys to do so.

Koopman tried to determine exactly where the Lexus may have been hit by Zainab while driving the Nissan in Niagara Falls. Shafia's story shifted ever so slightly. "She was reversing. I wasn't inside the car. I was watching from upstairs," he said.

Later in the interview Shafia claimed that Zainab even asked her mother if she could drive the Nissan on the highway, an astonishing notion, considering that she had no driver's licence and had never taken a driving course.

Shafia's recollections continued to jump around. "Even until the hotel, the car was perfect," he told Koopman, referring to the Kingston East Motel where they would later take rooms. "When we got to the hotel… and settle, my wife parked the Nissan."

Why would he suddenly introduce this specific information about Tooba parking the Nissan? As police would allege in building their case, Tooba never drove the Nissan to the Kingston East Motel. In fact, the Nissan never got there at all. Nor did the four women who died that night.

Koopman still had to get Shafia's permission to view the Lexus without resorting to a search warrant. Shafia claimed that this was the first he'd heard of the Lexus's being damaged.

"So why this is important for us," Koopman explained, "is that it's coincidental that he has damage to the Lexus when there's obviously some damage to the Nissan, and we just need to make sure that they're not connected."

Koopman eventually obtained permission to go that day to see the Lexus, suggesting Shafia could first seek a lawyer's advice if he wanted to. Shafia said he had no need of an attorney. "What I want is to know if my family member has been killed, has gone in the water, has been strangled, has been drugged. What has happened? That's what I'd like to know. If [s]he has taken drugs, if [s]he has gone mad. This is not human [i.e., normal] behaviour," he told Koopman.

Shafia said he, too, would go to Montreal so he could get clothes for his family. "Check the house, check the car, check street, check anywhere and … I will go with them [the police] or won't go. I just want to find out who killed my family. Did [s]he kill [her]self? Did individuals kill [them]? What happened? I don't know," said Shafia.

Later that day, police found the Lexus parked inside the lower-level garage of the residence. What they discovered would turn out to be extremely valuable to their case: 10 pieces of plastic inside and around the vehicle.

The pieces fit…

KINGSTON Police forensic identification officer Robert Etherington joined the Kingston Mills investigation on July 2 when he accompanied the bodies of the four women to Ottawa General Hospital, where autopsies would be performed by the pathologist, Dr. Christopher Milroy. It was a long day for Etherington who was at the morgue in Kingston General Hospital at 6 am to sign out the bodies. The examinations, which he photographed, ended at 6 pm. He got back to Kingston just before 9 pm and was immediately sent to the Kingston East Motel to complete more forensic work and to photograph the contents of rooms 18 and 19.

On the morning of July 3, Etherington signed out the pieces of plastic retrieved two days earlier from the garage at 8644 rue Bonnivet. Then he looked at Julia Moore's forensics photos from Kingston Mills, particularly the pieces of plastic found in the grass and at the lock edge. It was a moment of revelation for Etherington. "There could be an association between these pieces," he recalled in court. In other words, if the pieces of plastic found at the lock matched the pieces from Montreal, it would place the Lexus at Kingston Mills.

Etherington immediately contacted his boss, Inspector Brian Begbie. "I advised him that these pieces appeared to fit together." Etherington knew he was on to something. "I believed it was fairly important, yes. These pieces shouldn't match to that turn signal according to the story we knew at the time," he said. "The vehicles were very important and obviously the scene was important, and something was going on we didn't know about yet."

The case was upgraded that day to a homicide investigation, though police didn't make that information public right away.

The plastic shards would be sent to the Centre of Forensic Science crime lab in Toronto, where it was determined that the pieces from Montreal and Kingston Mills were, indeed, "once part of the same vehicle."

Growing suspicion…

"ONCE we had that physical evidence, we had concerns about the response from the family, such as [them] withholding information about the accident in Montreal," recalled lead investigator Chris Scott. "What's a typical response when you have four family members taken from you?" Clearly, not what police were hearing and seeing. There were also growing concerns for the surviving three children.

"We still had the [other] children in that family," said Scott. "You don't know the dynamics in the household."

Although police thought the Shafias' reactions were atypical, denial is not an uncommon response to the shock of losing a loved one to homicide. Nor are anger and rage. Although the anger is usually directed at the perpetrator of the murder, survivors can also be angry with the victim, for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or for having a lifestyle that put them in danger. Feelings of guilt and intense anguish can sometimes last for years.

According to Eric Schlosser, in his book A Grief Like No Other (1997): "In the days and weeks right after a murder the victim's family is often in a state of shock, feeling numb, sometimes unable to cry. The murder of a loved one seems almost impossible to comprehend. Life seems unreal, like a dream. Survivors may need to go over the details of the crime again and again, discussing them endlessly, as though trying to put together the pieces of a puzzle, struggling to make sense of it all."

Men may have difficulty grieving because they have been socialized to believe that real men should keep their feelings to themselves — expressing them is seen as a weakness. This would be even more likely in someone coming from a patriarchal culture like Afghanistan.

It's no wonder the police were confused by and even suspicious of the Shafias' responses. Nevertheless, the evidence, plus their gut reactions, were telling them something was not right.

Scott credits detectives Dempster and Koopman with conducting those early videotaped interviews with the Shafias.

"I thought it was brilliant in those first 24 hours — Detective Dempster's interviews with Hamed when he asked, 'Were you there?' The physical response was telling. It wasn't like a shock. If you're being interviewed the day four family members were found and you were asked were you there, you'd be incensed," said Scott.

Koopman's interview with Mohammad Shafia on July 1 was all about obtaining consent so investigators could get to the Shafia home in Montreal quickly and without a warrant to examine the Lexus. Over and over again, he got Mohammad to say that it was fine for police to go to his home on rue Bonnivet. "I conducted the full video so the judge or jury could see he was fully aware of it," said Koopman.

Meanwhile, Kingston Police grappled with the puzzling actions and statements of the Shafias.

Koopman had already begun to gather and analyse the cellphone data that would piece together the Shafia family's movements between June 23 and 30, from Montreal to Niagara Falls and back to Kingston.

The examination of those records revealed an aberration: on June 27, while the family was in the middle of their stay at Niagara Falls, Hamed's phone registered on the cellphone tower at Westbrook, just west of Kingston. Police and the Crown concluded that Hamed and Mohammad must have travelled to Kingston Mills to more precisely plan the murders. At the ensuing trial, Mohammad Shafia claimed he was alone in the Lexus and heading to Montreal on business when his family called to say they were bored in Niagara and wanted him to return. Hamed's phone, he testified, just happened to be in the vehicle.

"They tried to make [out] that Shafia could have been in the vehicle with the phone. What's interesting is we had Hamed on video saying he always had his phone [with him]," said Scott."He didn't even want to give it to his dad to go to Montreal on July 1," added Koopman. "It's weird a son is so attached to his phone he wouldn't give it to his dad in case of an emergency."

In his July 1 interview, Detective Steve Koopman asked Mohammad Shafia if there was any information he could release to the news media. Shafia asked for more time to notify family members, particularly Rona's people overseas.

"I was thinking about that," he told the officer. "I want to contact Rona's brother in France." As for his own family, Shafia said he had contacted some of them, but only to say in a general way that an accident had occurred. "I have to advise them slowly that one person has passed away, two people have passed away, but if all of a sudden I say four people have passed away, anyone would go crazy."