Eaton Centre shooting: Christopher Husbands guilty of two counts of second-degree murder

A jury has found Christopher Husbands guilty of two counts of second-degree murder after he shot dead two men and injured five bystanders in the Eaton Centre food court on a Saturday evening two years ago.

It was an act of violence that shook the city.

The verdict was delivered Wednesday evening after 13 hours of deliberation.

Husbands, 25, was charged with two counts of first-degree murder and several other charges including aggravated assault after the June 2, 2012 shooting. The defence argued that Husbands was not criminally responsible.

He was found guilty of two counts of second-degree, five counts of aggravated assault, one count of criminal negligence causing bodily harm and one count of recklessly discharging a firearm.

It was admitted at the start of the trial in mid-October that Husbands was the shooter. As seen on video surveillance footage, Husbands gunned down Ahmed Hassan, 24, and stood over Nixon Nirmalendran, 22, as he pumped four more bullets into him.

Hassan died on the floor of the food court; Nirmalendran in the hospital, nine days later. Five bystanders were injured in the hail of bullets, including a 13-year-old boy shot in the head who needed multiple brain surgeries, including removal of a part of his skull, to survive. A pregnant woman was allegedly trampled in the chaos, her shoulder dislocated.

The Crown argued this was planned revenge on the men who had stabbed Husbands multiple times in an attack months before. The defence argued that Husbands, traumatized by the stabbing, went into a “dissociative” state when he saw his attackers threaten him as they entered the food court and therefore is not criminally responsible for the shooting.

The videos are clear, a “frozen memory,” as Superior Court Justice Eugene Ewaschuk put it in his charge to the 12 jury members.

But when Husbands took the stand in his defence for four days, he claimed to recall almost none of it.

He remembers hearing Nixon Nirmalendran say: “Shoot him” and seeing Nirmalendran’s younger brother, Nisan, reach into his jacket pocket as if for a gun. (No other witness testified about seeing this, and it cannot be seen on the video.)

“I was terrified. I was thinking, this guy’s gonna shoot me. I’m gonna die,” Husbands testified.

“The next thing, I’m ducking and then I hear this loud bang.

“It just seemed like everything got kind of dark, everything looked like a shadow … shadows going down to the ground, to the side. I heard what sounded like pins dropping. It must have been the bullet casings.”

He testified that he first realized what had happened when he got home and turned on CP24.

An expert for the defence, forensic psychiatrist Dr. Julian Gojer, testified that Husbands was in a “dissociative state” during the shooting, arising from post-traumatic stress disorder. He was acting like a “robotic automaton” and is not criminally responsible, Gojer told the jury.

The Crown argued this was “ridiculous” and presented an expert witness who disagreed.

Forensic psychiatrist Dr. Peter Collins also diagnosed Husbands with moderate PTSD at the time of the shooting, but said that it is extremely rare for a dissociative state to occur. It does not happen in violent circumstances like these and only in cases where the PTSD is severe, he said.

Prosecutor Mary Humphrey suggested in her closing arguments to the jury that amnesia is a “convenient refuge” for people who find themselves in trouble with the law.

During his testimony Husbands told the jury he was born in Guyana, where he and his four siblings lived with their grandmother and aunt because their mother struggled with drug addiction. When Husbands was 11, they moved to Regent Park to live with their father.

Described by his younger sister as “nerdy,” quiet and inquisitive, Husbands witnessed a great deal of violence growing up and began “holding,” or hiding, guns for older boys and dealing drugs — first marijuana, then crack cocaine.

The incident that led to Husbands’ PTSD, flashbacks, fear of crowded places and paranoia, according to him, was a violent ambush in February 2012.

The Crown argues that Husbands was wreaking vengeance for the attack at an apartment by a group of men he knew from Regent Park, including the Nirmalendrans. Ahmed Hassan and two other men with them at the Eaton Centre were not there at the time of the attack.

He testified that he was beaten and dragged towards the bathroom, where the bath faucet was running. He was bound with duct tape, his face covered. The men stabbed him repeatedly — 35 times — and struck him with a gun, breaking his orbital bone. He was hospitalized for three days.

Whatever the reasons for the attack — Husbands told the jury he didn’t know why — the Crown argued that Husbands wanted to “get even” with those who had hurt him and wanted them to “feel the same pain he was feeling,” as a colleague at the City of Toronto Boys and Girls Club testified he told her.

So he armed himself with a loaded Glock and planned to take the opportunity whenever it presented itself to kill the men responsible for stabbing him, the Crown argued.

Husbands flatly denied this.

After the stabbing he changed, he told the court. He started having flashbacks and became hypervigilant and paranoid. He feared crowds, and his girlfriend LaChelle John had to force him to come with her to the Eaton Centre on June 2 to buy rollerblades at SportChek.

The Crown suggests his PTSD symptoms were exaggerated and that his feelings of paranoia stemmed from his drug-dealing and flagrant violation of his bail terms, including house arrest for a sex-assault charge on which he was later convicted.

John said she was buying Husbands sushi to try for the first time when Nixon and Nisan Nirmalendran, Ahmed Hassan, Robert Cada and Ahmed Nuri — who has since disappeared and is believed to be in Africa — came down the escalator.

Nisan Nirmalendran was shot dead almost a year after the Eaton Centre shooting.

According to a statement Nuri gave to the police, Husbands said, “Waddup” or “Waddup pussy.” Robert Cada testified that he heard Husbands say: “Waddup” and John also said she heard Husbands say: “What.”

Husbands said he heard “Shoot him” and saw Nisan Nirmalendran reach as if for a gun. There is no evidence that Nisan or any of the five men were carrying a gun.

If the jury were to find Husbands was lying about the statement and the gesture, Ewaschuk said in his charge, “there is no evidentiary basis to find that he experienced a dissociative state.”

Or, as the Crown put it during the trial, the “house of cards” would come tumbling down.

The jury was given several options: first-degree murder, second-degree murder, manslaughter, not criminally responsible, and not guilty.

On Wednesday afternoon, the jury asked a question about what constitutes first-degree murder – a planned and deliberate murder. They wanted to know if there are any time requirements in forming a plan and how far in advance of the murder deliberation needs to happen.

Ewaschuk told them that the “several seconds” Husbands had between seeing the Nirmalendrans and Hassan and shooting would not be enough time to form a plan, so if there was a plan it must have been made before the food court sighting. It is up to the jury to decide if the time between sighting and shooting was enough time to deliberate on the advantages and disadvantages of murder, he said.