The Johnathon Trial: A Roller Coaster Of Emotions, Mistrials & Disturbing Testimony
Posted September 29, 2006 12:00 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
It began on November 25, 2003, when police were alerted by a frantic 911 call from a Toronto family. A step-father got word of a horrific discovery at his home – the body of his young son stuffed in a crawl space of the family home. Forensics would show he’d been stabbed 71 times.
The unsuspecting dad had also been bludgeoned with a baseball bat, but managed to survive the attack.
It didn’t take long for police to hone in on the suspects and the disclosure of who they were sent shock waves throughout the G.T.A. The boy’s own brother, then just 16, was accused of masterminding the plot with two friends, who cops contended participated in the brutal slaying.
All three were charged with first-degree murder.
Because their names were protected under the Youth Criminal Justice Act, they would go to trial unnamed. And because he’d killed his own brother, the victim was also relegated to anonymity, known to the world only as “Johnathon” (finally pictured, top left).
As bizarre as the case already seemed, it got stranger. Three months into a marathon trial, the words of one witness forced everyone to start all over.
A young girl who was a friend of the accused had secretly tape recorded conversations with the accused in which some of the participants admitted their roles in the crime and revealed that the brother had actually planned to kill everyone in his family.
During the course of her astounding testimony, the girl made reference to one of the accused frequenting a vampire website, the same one that would figure into the Dawson College shooting in Montreal three years later.
The defence called it bragging and the website references a coincidence and insisted the youngster had just been trying to impress the witness.
The jury began deliberating with that evidence in mind, and it appeared the case was nearly over and the boys’ fates would be sealed.
But no one expected what happened next.
When a newspaper discovered the young girl had posted online blogs that indicated she was far more involved in the vampire fantasy world than she let on, the judge was forced to declare a mistrial, ruling the girl had misled the jury.
And so the process, already expensive and emotionally exhausting, began again from scratch. This time, the Crown was ready for all the surprises and had a blueprint to take the trial down a different road.
They succeeded in convicting the brother, now 19, of first-degree murder in February, three years after the bloody and brutal act of violence first brought police to his door
One of his friends, who was 18 by the time the second trial ended, was found guilty of manslaughter.
The third youngster was acquitted.
The sentencing hearing seemed to go almost as long as the case that led to it, with the judge taking extra time to decide if the convicted killers should be sentenced as the juveniles they were when the murder took place or the adults they became as they waited for justice.
On Friday, the long journey to a resolution wrapped up, with the brother going to jail for life and his cohort in crime sentenced to a youth facility.
