Man guilty of attempted murder in 2016 shootings

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This article was published 23/07/2021 (1694 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A 27-year-old Winnipeg man has been convicted of four counts of attempted murder, following a trial in which none of the victims identified the accused as their attacker in court.

Instead, a judge ruled she could rely on police statements three of the young men made from their hospital beds naming Haben Weldekidan as the man who shot them outside a Hazel Dell Avenue house party in March 2016.

“There is no stated motive as to why these complainants were unable to recall what they had told (police) in their video-recorded statements,” Queen’s Bench Justice Joan McKelvey wrote in a decision delivered Thursday.

“The fact that they could not do so at trial might be a consequence of the passage of time or other reasons,” she said. “However, that does not mean that their statements were not reliable or an accurate accounting of what occurred.”

Court heard evidence Weldekidan had gotten into an argument with one of the victims at Bar Red Sea on Portage Avenue before ending up at the same house party sometime around 4 a.m.

In a video statement provided to police nine days later, while recovering in hospital, the man said Weldekidan, who had been a friend for about six years, motioned him to come outside for what he believed was going to be a one-on-one fight. Once in the back lane, Weldekidan pulled out a handgun and shot the man in the stomach.

In their individual video statements to police, two other victims said they were shot multiple times by the accused; one when he came to the first man’s aid, another as he sat on the backyard deck.

A fourth man was grazed by a bullet as he drove the first victim to hospital.

At trial, the three victims who provided video statements claimed to have little memory of the night they were shot or any memory of talking to police.

Defence lawyers argued the men were drunk at the time they were shot, their recall was compromised by pain medication and their version of events was cobbled together from what they heard talking to others or through social media prior to providing police statements.

A review of the video statements, however, showed the victims to be “calm, alert and relaxed,” and suffering no apparent effects from the pain medication, McKelvey said, noting each victim’s evidence corroborated, in many instances, the evidence of the others, as well as the forensic evidence.

Referring to one victim’s evidence, McKelvey said: “I’m not satisfied (he) would have been able to concoct such a consistent version of what occurred if it had been pieced together from other sources.”

McKelvey convicted Weldekidan of additional weapons offences and breaches of court orders.

Weldekidan remains in custody. He will be sentenced at a later date.

This is the second trial Weldekidan has faced on the same charges. An earlier trial ended in an acquittal after a judge ruled the video statements of the three victims who identified Weldekidan as the shooter were not sufficiently reliable to be admitted as evidence. The Manitoba Court of Appeal later ordered a new trial.

In 2019, while on bail for the 2016 shootings, Weldekidan was arrested for his alleged involvement in the gang-related shooting of a man behind the old St. Regis Hotel in Winnipeg.

Weldekidan arrived at a nearby hospital suffering from a gunshot wound and was later arrested, after allegedly hiding a firearm near the shooting scene.

Last summer, Weldekidan was one of a dozen people arrested following a nine-month police investigation that netted 22 illegal firearms, five kilograms of cocaine, and nearly $200,000 in cash.

dean.pritchard@freepress.mb.ca