As a dramatic takedown of two suspected car-and-airbag thieves shattered the predawn quiet of a sleepy Markham neighbourhood almost four years ago, so did it also end with a 42-year-old York Regional Police officer dying on a suburban lawn.
Detective Constable Rob Plunkett, a 22-year veteran who was part of an undercover surveillance team, was killed during the arrest in the early morning hours of Aug. 2, 2007, his aorta severed as he was crushed against a tree.
Now the trial of his alleged killer, a baby-faced young man named Nadeem Jiwa, has begun.
Now 23 but just 19 at the time, Mr. Jiwa is pleading not guilty to first-degree murder in Det. Constable Plunkett's death.
Mr. Jiwa was purportedly trying to avoid arrest as the surveillance team moved in for the takedown, allegedly jumping into a gold Honda Accord he and an accomplice had stolen shortly before. As he threw the vehicle into reverse and it roared backwards, Det. Constable Plunkett, running to help in the takedown, was caught up in the driver's-side open door.
When the vehicle slammed against the tree on a lawn on Ascot Crescent in the Steeles Avenue East/Birchmount Road neighbourhood, the officer was "crushed to death," senior Crown counsel Michal Fairburn told Ontario Superior Court Justice Michelle Fuerst and a jury Monday.
Ms. Fairburn was making the Crown's opening statement, and while she agreed that events that morning likely unfolded very quickly - a theory she said she expects Mr. Jiwa's lawyer, Laurence Cohen, to advance later - she told the jurors that offers the young man no defence.
"The speed with which someone kills another human being does not - cannot - dictate whether they are guilty of murder," she said.
She painted a rich picture of the scene in the still neighbourhood, where streets bear names like Harvest Moon and Longmeadow. "While most of us were sleeping," Ms. Fairburn said, police were "hard at work" that early morning.
The five-member surveillance team was shadowing Mr. Jiwa at the request of the force's criminal investigation bureau, which in response to a rash of air bag thefts set up what it called "Project Hot Air."
At the time the project started, Detective Stephen Beale testified, the thefts were a weekly occurrence, with York reporting a total of 68, most in the Ascot Crescent area, and, over the border to Toronto just south of it, there had been hundreds of thefts.
There was at the time a thriving black market for stolen air bags, Det. Beale said, which fetched about $250 apiece but could be sold to unsuspecting consumers for $1,000 to $1,500 each.
By the spring of that year, one Baseer Mohammed Yousaf-Zai had emerged as a leading suspect, and by late July, Det. Beale said, Mr. Jiwa had also come to the unit's attention as one of his associates, and the CIB had asked for the surveillance specialists.
The pair were followed the night before, with police tailing them to a casino, and then to the Markham neighbourhood, where they began cruising the area in the white Honda Civic Mr. Jiwa was then driving.
At 4:44 a.m. on Aug. 2, Det. Constable Plunkett radioed that he "was on the eye," meaning he was out of his vehicle, had hidden himself and was able to see both suspects.
Just 13 minutes later, the surveillance team boss called for the takedown.
According to Ms. Fairburn, one officer ran to arrest Mr. Yousaf-Zai, shouting, "Police! Don't move!" with Det. Constable Plunkett running toward Mr. Jiwa, also yelling "Police! Police! Police!" so loudly, the prosecutor said, that a civilian witness in a nearby house heard him through closed windows.
Mr. Yousaf-Zai is not charged in Det. Constable Plunkett's death.
The case, Ms. Fairburn suggested, is not a who-done-it.
Police that morning found eight stolen air bag assemblies in Mr. Jiwa's car. They had been stolen from four vehicles parked in area driveways, as was the gold Honda Accord.
She told the jurors the case is "not about who killed" the officer, how Det. Constable Plunkett "met his death," or if he was performing his job. All that, she said, was "pretty apparent" already.
The trial, she said, is "largely about what was in Mr. Jiwa's mind at the time he killed officer Plunkett," and she pointed to several "conscious decisions" she said Mr. Jiwa made - chiefly, to resist arrest, jump in the car and to throw it into reverse with Det. Constable Plunkett hanging onto the open door. "He must have appreciated" the officer was in grave danger, she said.
For murder to be considered first-degree, it must be planned and deliberate, meaning intentional, or committed during another serious criminal offence. And while any murder of a police officer is usually deemed first-degree, courts have held that the accused must have known the victim was an officer.