A young man accused of killing his three sisters and another woman saw them plunge into a canal in a car, so he dangled a rope in the water looking for signs of life, but after seeing none, drove home and told no one of the incident, court heard Friday.
Hamed Shafia, 20, changed his story about what happened in the early morning hours of June 30, 2009, in an interview about four months after the deaths with a man his father had hired as a private investigator.
"After they fell down, maybe in this spot about seven or eight minutes I was looking and calling, but they were not responding," Hamed tells Moosa Hadi.
An audio recording of the interview, conducted in the family's native language Dari and subtitled in English, was played in court Friday.
"First I thought that if I call the police, they would blame me that she didn't have (a) licence," Hamed said.
Hamed and his parents are on trial for four counts each of first-degree murder. Hamed, his mother Tooba Mohammad Yahya, 41, and his father Mohammad Shafia, 58, have pleaded not guilty. The Crown alleges they killed the three Shafia sisters and one of the father's two wives over family honour.
The bodies of Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17, Geeti, 13, and Rona Amir Mohammad, 50, Shafia's first wife in a polygamous marriage, were found in a submerged car at the bottom of a canal in Kingston, Ont.
The Montreal family had stopped in Kingston on their way home from a trip to Niagara Falls, Ont. The accused told police Zainab must have taken the car from their motel and driven the four into the water in a terrible accident.
The new version of events from Hamed came after Hadi, who developed a fervent belief in the family's innocence, presented the family with the evidence that police had disclosed to the lawyers. The Crown alleges that the story Hamed told Hadi is not what really happened.
After the family got to the motel around 1:30 a.m. that night, having left Niagara Falls around 6 p.m., Geeti and Sahar stayed in the car, Zainab wanted to take it for a spin and Rona Mohammad wanted to find somewhere that sold phone cards, Hamed said. He was concerned about their safety because Zainab was inexperienced and did not have a driver's licence, so he followed them in the family's other car, a Lexus SUV, he said.
They drove all the way to the Kingston Mills locks, where Hamed rear-ended them because he was following too closely and they braked suddenly, he said. Pieces of the Lexus headlight fell on the ground, he said. Hamed was urging them to make a U-turn so they could return to the motel, when all of a sudden the car went into the water, he said.
So he sounded the horn of the Lexus, then got a rope, he said.
"I put the rope a few times in the water ... nothing happened," Hamed said. "I moved it a little bit to see if they take it."
After receiving no response to the jiggling rope, Hamed got in his car and left, driving through the night to Montreal, about three hours away. He didn't call police or tell his parents because he thought he would get in trouble for allowing Zainab to drive, he said.
"They will tell me, 'This person doesn't have a licence,' and ... so I was scared and changed my mind," Hamed said. "I decided with myself not to say that I was with them."
He did want to tell his parents, Hamed told Hadi, but "there wasn't any opportunity to inform them."
Earlier this week, the jury watched the police interrogation of Hamed, in which the officer hammers him about broken pieces of the Lexus SUV's headlight that were found at the scene. Hamed can't explain why those pieces were at the scene, but the Crown alleges the accused used the Lexus to push the other car into the water.
Witnesses have suggested the car would have had to trace a very deliberate path over a curb, over rocks, make two U-turns and another sharp turn into the locks, in a spot with little clearance on either side of the car.
Hadi, who was an engineering student at Queen's University, had originally offered his services to the family's lawyers as an interpreter as he spoke the same language. Shafia hired him on the side as a private investigator of sorts to "uncover the truth," court heard. That gave him access to the same evidence from police as the lawyers.
He made an audio recording of Hamed's story — which he said Hamed first told him the night before — so he could present it to police, believing it would convince them of the error of their ways and they would drop all the charges. Instead, he was called to testify as a Crown witness.