Sophia Alfonso Gomez was sitting at a bus stop on Douglas Street when a boy came up to her, holding his chest and asking for help, a B.C. Supreme Court trial heard Wednesday.
“When I looked up, Justin was in front of me… He said, ‘Please help me. I’ve just been stabbed.’ He started shaking, then he fell down,” Alfonso Gomez testified at Cory Barry’s trial for the second-degree murder of Justin Wendland.
The Crown alleges Barry, 41, stabbed the 15-year-old Victoria High School student twice in the chest on the evening of June 3, 2010, then ran to the Victoria police station on Caledonia Avenue with his tan-coloured pit bull.
Barry has pleaded not guilty to the crime.
Alfonso Gomez, who was an exchange student from Spain, testified that she quickly dialled 911, but passed the phone to someone else. Seconds later, she saw a man running down Douglas Street with a big, dark brown dog on a leash.
Alfonso Gomez said she didn’t know Wendland, but her friend Shane Hambley did. She had arrived at the bus stop about 10 minutes earlier with Hambley, who was on a bike.
“Shane saw his friend Justin and ran up to him and hugged him,” she recalled.
Alfonso Gomez sat down to wait for the bus. Hambley talked with Justin for a few minutes, then left, she said. Shortly after, Wendland, who was bleeding, came to her for help.
During cross-examination, Alfonso Gomez told defence lawyer Chris Mackie that there was no sign of a commotion or fight and she did not hear any shouting or swearing.
Witness Katie Tidd-Mills testified that she was waiting for the bus with her boyfriend, Cory Walker, that evening. She glanced behind her and saw a man with a pit bull giving a boy a “kind of hug,” she said.
She thought nothing of it, then heard a commotion. Looking around again, she saw the boy on the ground. The man was running away with the dog on a chain leash.
“A few people said, ‘Oh, someone’s been stabbed,’ ” Tidd-Mills testified.
Walker testified that he heard a thud, then turned around and saw someone lying on the ground.
“At first I thought he was knocked out. Later, I realized he’d been stabbed,” he told the court.
Walker said he saw a man in a blue hooded sweatshirt running away with a dog on a chain leash. He then called 911.
He did not hear any sounds of a fight, Walker told defence lawyer Jeff Johnston.
Justin’s sister, Kayla Wendland, also testified Wednesday about the night her brother died. Wendland, 23, said that she and two friends were walking down Bay Street after 8 p.m. on their way to the Dairy Queen when a man with a sandy-coloured pit bull brushed past her and went into the bush beside the fire station and stayed there.
“I didn’t want to talk to him. He looked fairly distraught,” Wendland testified.
The man was acting weird and muttering things, she said.
Earlier this week, Victoria Fire Capt. Mark Robertson testified that he was getting papers from his truck in the parking lot of the fire hall at 740 Bay St. about 8 p.m. when he noticed a man standing about three metres away.
Robertson said he got out of his truck, but kept his distance when he noticed the man had a large pit bull on a leash.
“I told him it was private property. He said he was just looking around. I told him again it was private property.”
The man turned around and walked out a gate onto Westbourne Place and headed toward Bay Street. Robertson saw the man tie the dog to a pipe then go into a compound used by a nearby plumbing company.
Although his demeanor was calm, the man seemed like he was high on something, Robertson said.
“His eyes were shifting a lot. His eyes looked really crazy,” he said.
Minutes later, first responders were called to a stabbing outside the Times Colonist building.
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