Shopkeeper’s killing was murder: Crown

Prosecutor not satisfied with manslaughter charge for 27-year-old accused of deadly convenience store robbery

Assistant Crown attorney Janet Booy won’t have to prove Patrick Smith is a killer. He’s already admitted it. Instead, Booy’s challenge will lie in convincing a jury that Smith intended to murder 31-year-old Elham Dashti as he robbed her downtown convenience store.

“Look closely in the evidence for signs that he knew what he was doing,” Booy instructed the 12-member jury in her opening address Wednesday.

Smith, 27, is charged with first-degree murder in the May 2010 killing. He has pleaded not guilty. Clad in a beige houndstooth blazer and black pants, Smith sat motionless in the prisoner’s box as Booy hinted at her strategy.

In the coming days, she’ll rely on the testimony of several witnesses to help prove her case, including investigators, para- medics and the pair of shoppers who alerted police to the crime. She’ll also appeal to scientific evidence, such as fingerprints and DNA, to help establish Smith’s alleged guilt.

Booy told the jury the morning of the killing was “just like any other” for Dashti. She left for work at High Times, the King Street East shop she owned with her husband, Mohammed, before he woke up. In the early afternoon, she called to rouse him.

“That was the last time she’d ever speak to him,” the prosecutor told court.

Booy said security footage from a nearby business captured Smith entering the store at 1:38 p.m.

He left 17 minutes later, hopping into a cab with Dashti’s green purse, $340 in cash and four packs of smokes, according to the prosecutor.

Two shoppers walked into the store soon after. When they couldn’t find the shopkeeper, they told the police — who soon found Dashti face down in a pool of blood in the store’s basement, her head scarf tied so tightly around her neck “it had to be cut off.”

Booy also told jurors about Smith’s arrest months after the attack.

When police interviewed him, she said, Smith told them he killed Dashti and specifically “targeted and planned to rob” her shop because it didn’t have any security cameras.

She also said Smith told police he put Dashti “in a sleeper hold,” forced her down the stairs and wrapped a head scarf around her neck.

When she wouldn’t be quiet, he “punched and kicked her” until she stopped moving.

Booy told court the accused has made an effort to apologize to Dashti’s husband and daughter, who was six years old when her mother was killed.

In a letter to the pair, “he said he was sorry but he needed the money to buy drugs,” Booy said.

He ‘punched and kicked her’ until she stopped moving.

JANET BOOY

ASSISTANT CROWN ATTORNEY

Earlier Wednesday, Superior Court Justice R.B. Reid told the jury that Smith was prepared to plead guilty to manslaughter.

But Booy wouldn’t accept the plea, saying she believes the level of culpability is “that of first-degree murder.”

The trial, which is scheduled to run four weeks, resumes Thursday, with the Crown expected to call its first witness.