Accused killer of Kelvin High stabbing victim wasn’t who he was looking to fight, court told

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This article was published 02/11/2017 (3257 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

After he was cleared as a suspect in a fatal high school incident, the boy who had been taunted by stabbing victim Brett Bourne declined to speak to police, court heard Thursday.

The then-17-year-old had been dating Bourne’s ex-girlfriend, and Bourne wanted to fight him June 2, 2015, at Kelvin High School.

Bourne had chased the teen into the Winnipeg school in the moments before the stabbing, and police initially considered Bourne’s target a suspect in the homicide investigation. They didn’t get a chance to ask him about his side of the story before the focus of their investigation switched to another 17-year-old boy who allegedly got involved in the fight, court heard.

That male, now 19, has pleaded not guilty to second-degree murder and a jury is hearing evidence as the Court of Queen’s Bench trial nears the end of its second week.

Court-ordered publication bans mean none of the youth, except for the victim, can be identified.

Winnipeg Police Service Patrol Sgt. Brian Bailey testified he was assigned to interview the 17-year-old Bourne had tried to start a fight with prior to the stabbing. The homicide unit considered the teen a suspect, and he was detained in a room at the downtown Public Safety Building for the interview, with his mother present.

Bailey said the process of explaining his legal rights as a youth took quite a bit of time, so the interview didn’t get underway. As more information came in during the investigation, police focused on another suspect and told the 17-year-old he was no longer considered a suspect around 5:45 a.m. the next day.

Bailey testified police hadn’t “had a chance” to ask the teen about his involvement in the incident, and when Bailey asked him to provide a witness statement, he refused, after seeking legal advice.

Several other witnesses have testified Bourne, while riding his bike past Kelvin, spotted the boy he believed was dating his ex-girlfriend. (She would later testify she had broken up with the other boy about a week earlier, but hadn’t told Bourne.)

According to witnesses, Bourne tried to goad him into a fight, calling him names before running across the street and chasing him into the school.

Crown prosecutors’ theory of what happened, which is being tested in court, is the accused got a knife out of his friend’s car when he heard Bourne threatening the other boy and stabbed him after Bourne ran into the school.

The accused admitted stabbing Bourne, a friend testified Wednesday. The friend, who was also 17 at the time, said the accused was among a group of teen boys who got into his car in the aftermath of the stabbing. He testified they told him Bourne’s target had been attacked and needed to go somewhere safe.

“We start driving to get (the other boy) away from the situation, and then part-way on the drive, (the accused) says, ‘I got him.’ And I ask, what do you mean? He says, ‘I think I stabbed him.’ And then I panic and start to drive somewhere safe,” the witness testified.

The witness said he kept a knife in his car for “survival camping” and noticed the accused had picked up the knife earlier that day, when they went to his car while Bourne was still trying to start a fight from across the street. The witness said he had mentioned he had a knife that could be used “as a last resort” in case of an attack by Bourne.

He said the accused looked at the folding knife in his car, “and then he put it back in the cupholder – the sheath. I thought the knife was in the sheath at the time.”

Later, the accused would describe where he’d allegedly stabbed Bourne, the witness said. “He patted his side and then said, ‘but I don’t think I got his lung.’”

The stab wound did damage Bourne’s lung, as well as his heart, acting chief medical examiner Dr. John Younes testified Thursday.

Younes performed the autopsy on Bourne and found the cause of death was a stab wound to the left side of the chest — a type of injury that would have required immediate emergency surgery, he said.

“At the location he was injured at, this was not a survivable injury,” Younes said, describing the force of the stab as a “fairly powerful thrust.”

“It’s not a tentative thrust. It would take considerable force,” to cause the injuries Younes said he examined.

katie.may@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @thatkatiemay