KINGSTON, Ont. — Seven women and five men must now decide if the deaths of four Montreal women were a tragic accident or murder.
Deliberations got underway Friday afternoon in the Shafia murder trial.
Mohammad Shafia, 59, his wife Tooba Yahya, 42, and their eldest son Hamed, 21, were charged with are each charged with four counts of first-degree murder in the 2009 drowning deaths of sisters Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17, and Geeti, 13, and their stepmother, Rona Amir Mohammad, 52.
Court officials whisked them all off to a hotel where they will be sequestered in the evenings until they deliver a verdict.
They began their deliberations at 4:30 p.m Friday, but then broke for the evening at 5:45 p.m.
How long the jury will take to make a decision is anybody’s guess.
During the day the jury will work at the Frontenac County Court House where the suspects will be held in waiting.
A special courtroom has been set up for the dozens of media to congregate while they await a verdict.
Meanwhile the jury have three months of testimony to sift through -- including nearly 60 witnesses.
In his seven-hour charge, Justice Robert Maranger told the jury they have three options. One is to find the defendants guilty of first-degree murder or to find them not guilty of it.
He said they call also find all three of them, or one or more of them, guilty of second degree murder.
For the jury it comes down to this: These Montreal women were either brutally murdered in a scheme to protect family honour or died by misadventure in a bizarre set of circumstances.
The accused claim that the four women had gone out for a joy ride and to look for phone cards at 2 a.m. near Kingston and accidently ended up on the canal road, where the Kingston Mills locks are situated.
They told the jury Hamed, who was supposed to drive back to Montreal ahead of the rest of the family, had followed them down there and accidently smashed into the rear of them.
He then got out of his vehicle, picked up from the roadway the debris from a damaged headlight when suddenly the car carrying his three sisters and his step-mother headed toward the lock and over into the water. He says he grabbed a rope and tried to dangle it into the black water but no one responded. Afraid of what his father might say, he then fled the scene and drove to Montreal where he also got into an accident and damaged the same headlight.
The Crown said the whole thing was staged. The Crown argued the women were drowned first, placed in the car, then the car was nudged over the locks with a second car.
“The whole reason for the vacation was to kill them,” said Crown Laurie Lacelle in her closing.
Not true, say defence lawyers Peter McCann, David Crowe and Peter Kemp.
“There was just not enough time for such a theory,” said Kemp, who says the four women were at a nearby motel earlier and this was just a terrible accident.
McCann added it “makes no sense for them to wait there to be drowned like lambs to the slaughter.”
But the jury must also consider wire taps in this case that have Mohammad Shafia saying his “honour” had been restored and the “whore” and “filthy” daughters had “betrayed” him.
The defence said this was only said after the deaths and he saw pictures of his daughters with boys, but Crown showed TV footage of Shafia with that same photo album on the day the media were at his house to cover the tragedy.
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