Brutality Canada Police Brutality O Canada

Johnson shot while kneeling or crouching,
pathologist says

By Christie Blatchford
Toronto Star,
October 28, 1980

Albert Johnson was probably crouching or kneeling at the foot of a stairway in his home when he was shot by Metro police last year, a County Court jury has been told. Dr. John Hillsdon-Smith, director of forensic pathology for Ontario, yesterday testified that the bullet that fatally injured Johnson entered his abdomen at a 45 degree angle and travelled downward. Becuase of the angle of entry and the path of the bullet, he said, the gun must have been higher than Johnson.

Aorta damage

Hillsdon-Smith, who performed the autopsy on the body of the 35-year-old Jamaican immigrant, was testifying at the manslaughter trial of two Metro policemen charged in Johnson's death.

Constables William Inglis, 36, and Walter Cargnelli, 23, have pleaded not guilty.

Johnson died in hospital about six hours after the Aug. 26, 1979, shooting. His aorta - the body's main artery - had been damaged by the bullet, causing hemorrhaging in his abdomen.

Though Hillsdon-Smith wasn't asked directly about what might have happened during the shooting, he was given three hypothetical scenarios by Clive Bynoe, Lawyer for Inglis, and asked to comment on them. He said the first scenario - in which a man was coming down the stairs as he was shot from below - was "not consistent" with the results of the autopsy. The second situation - in which the man was kneeling at the bottom of the stairs when shot from above - could be consistent with the evidence if the man's upper body was straight, not bent forward. The third hypothetical version - in which the man was crouched at the bottom of the stairs, holding a weapon over his head, and sprang up and forward as he was shot from above - was consistent with the angle of entry and path of the bullet, Hillsdon-Smith said.

"It's pretty well impossible to place the shooter and the victim" from the results of an autopsy, he told the jury. But he said the bullet's angle of entry definitely showed "the gun was higher than the person."

The jury has already been told conflicting versions of what happened at Johnson's Manchester Ave. home in the five-minute confrontation with police that led to the shooting. Johnson's 30 year-old widow, Lemona, and her sister, Bevolyn Williams, 27, testified that Johnson was relatively quiet and calm during the fracas. Miss Williams told the jury her brother -in-law was quietly surrendering, and coming down the stairs, when shots rang out. But a neighbor, Shafikool Mohammed, said that, from the rear of the house where he was standing, he could hear, Johnson screaming and swearing just before shots were fired.

And earlier yesterday, one of Johnson's four children, 9-year-old Colsie, told the jury her father was forced to kneel and was shot execution style by police. Wearing bright beads and white bows in her hair, the Grade 3 pupil said her father came down the stairs - hands held above his head in a gesture of surrender - and was ordered to get on his knees by police standing in the hallway. "They said 'Kneel down,' and then he kneeled down at the bottom of the stairs. Then he turned around and then they shot him," the little girl told a crowded courtroom. She denied suggestions by Bynoe that her evidence might have been influenced by later conversations she overheard about what happened.

Lawn edger

Like her 11-year-old sister Michelle, who preceded her to the witness box, Colsie wasn't sworn in as a witness. Judge Frank Dunlap ruled the two children didn't fully understand the meaning of taking an oath. A lawn edger seized by police after the shooting also figured in testimony yesterday. The jury has already been told that extensive tests of the two-foot-long implement revealed no fingerprints at all.

Reprinted under the Fair Use doctrine of international copyright law.

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This page created July 30, 2001