When Bailey Zaveda was shot to death outside a pub in Toronto's east downtown a couple of years ago, there came from many of the usual places the usual assurances that, appearances to the contrary, gun crime in the city was indeed down.
If meant as comfort, these mutterings fell far short: One like Ms. Zaveda is too many.
When just before one in the morning on Oct. 25, 2008, Dwight Marshall cried out at the Duke of York tavern, "You just shot a girl! Hey, you just shot a girl!", it was Ms. Zaveda he was describing.
A girl she was, just 23, starting a promising career, on the cusp of so much.
She lived in Leslieville, an area in mid-gentrification, and that night was at the tavern not far from her apartment. She and a few others were standing outside, having a smoke like the good little pariahs smokers have become in the modern world, when gunfire rang out.
Mr. Marshall's cry had no effect; the man with the 9-mm Luger kept firing until his weapon was empty. Bullets shattered the glass doors of the pub, spent casings littered the rain-slicked street, and, in addition to Ms. Zaveda being killed, four other people were shot and wounded.
"She [Ms. Zaveda]took her last breaths on the front steps of the bar," prosecutor Ann Morgan told the jury that on Thursday took charge of the case.
Ms. Morgan alleges that it was the man in the dark suit, sitting in the prisoner's box, who was the shooter - one Kyle Weese, now 27.
Mr. Weese, who is pleading not guilty to one count of first-degree murder and four of aggravated assault for the woundings, was well-known in the pub.
According to Ms. Morgan, among the eyewitnesses who will testify are three people who knew the young man with the brooding brow from the area - a long-time bouncer at The Duke, as the pub is known; one of the owners, who actually served Mr. Weese that night, and a Duke regular, who knew Mr. Weese and his family and who Ms. Morgan said "saw the shooting happen in front of his eyes" and who later learned that his wife was one of the wounded.
It would seem, by the prosecutor's opening statement, that these three witnesses will not say merely that they saw a tall white man with a gun, but rather that they saw the particular tall white man they knew as Mr. Weese with a gun.
Their collective account, as briefly described by Ms. Morgan, has Mr. Weese and a man named Addie Reddick involved in a dispute. One witness spotted Mr. Weese near the door, agitated and mumbling something about somebody "touching my girlfriend's arm" and yelling toward a group of Nova Scotians, including Mr. Reddick.
Eventually, the bouncer asked Mr. Weese to leave and escorted him outside. Mr. Reddick's uncle Nathan allegedly removed his rings, presumably in case he had to fight, and Addie followed Mr. Weese outside. Angry words were exchanged, but as Ms. Morgan noted, "the dispute never became physical," and in fact, Addie Reddick turned to return to the bar.
Reading between the lines, it appears that the Nova Scotians were perhaps readying for a brawl of the old-fashioned sort.
But it appears Mr. Weese was neither going to engage in a fistfight nor walk away. Both Nathan Reddick and the veteran regular apparently saw Mr. Weese go to the curb and come back with the gun.
Nathan Reddick, Ms. Morgan said, "clearly saw the gun and yelled 'Gun!'"
As Nathan tried to scramble back into the bar, he felt something on his leg; Ms. Zaveda already "had gone down and was grabbing onto him as she fell, wounded."
Nathan was shot three times. Shannon Tasse, Peter Howell and Brenda Lee Williams were also wounded.
As for Ms. Zaveda, she did not die alone. She was assisted, Ms. Morgan said, by patron Derek Hall, who had the presence of mind to search for identification in her purse so he could whisper her name.
By the time Toronto Police Sergeant Glen George got to her side, just two minutes after the first call to 911, Ms. Zaveda wasn't breathing. She was lying on her back, eyes wide open but, Sgt. George said, and here he had to take a moment to compose himself, "rolled to the back of her head."
He felt for a pulse, and found none.
It took the prosecutor and an identification officer then in the stand 12 minutes to introduce into evidence and formally make the 13 spent cartridge cases exhibits, a whole hell of a lot longer than it takes to shoot a girl.