Gerald Stanley’s son testifies about Boushie shooting

For the first time in court, a person who witnessed the shooting of Colten Boushie has detailed what they saw and heard that evening.

Sheldon Stanley, the son of Gerald Stanley, took the stand as a Crown witness on Wednesday morning.

The 28-year-old told the jury he was working on a fence with his father when they heard a loud vehicle coming down the road.

“It definitely caught our attention,” he said.

Sheldon noted the SUV stopped near a truck in the yard, which his father had been working on for a customer. A man got into the truck and started searching through it. Sheldon thought they were the owner of the vehicle, and they’d come to pick it up.

However, the SUV then continued straight to the work shed at the back of the yard.

As the Stanleys began walking towards the area, they heard a quad start up. Gerald yelled, and the man who was on the quad jumped back in the SUV and it reversed, splitting the father and son up on either side.

Sheldon said he took a framing hammer from his belt and swung back-handed, hitting the SUV’s windshield.

“I was angry,” he said.

The SUV then went back towards the grid road, but ended up swerving and striking a blue Ford Escape sitting in the yard.

“It was moving as fast as it could with the flat tire,” he said, noting he believed it struck the Escape intentionally before sliding to a halt.

Sheldon said he ran into the house to grab his truck keys, in case the SUV still managed to get away. As he did, he heard two shots he said were “seconds apart.” A third rang out as he was coming back outside.

He said he saw his father holding a handgun and standing by the driver’s side door of the SUV.

“It just went off,” Sheldon remembered Gerald saying, adding his dad looked like he would be sick.

Sheldon said Gerald then said: “I just wanted to scare them … I bumped (him) and it just went off.”

The son, who was visiting his parents the day of the shooting, said he saw two men standing at the end of the driveway. There were also two young women in the back of the SUV.

Sheldon said the women got out of the car screaming, and pulled Boushie’s body out of the driver’s compartment. As they did so, a rifle without a stock fell out from between his legs.

Sheldon told court one of the women picked up the gun and was “almost mocking” the situation.

“Bang bang,” he remembered them saying.

Leesa Stanley, Sheldon’s mother, came over from mowing the lawn and told her son to call 9-1-1 after the two men at the end of the driveway ran away.

As he did so, he said the women from the SUV attacked Leesa and that he told them to get off of her.

Eventually the women left, and Sheldon went into the house with his mother. She made a pot of coffee as they waited for the police to arrive, while Gerald paced in his metal shed.

Sheldon said Leesa went out to meet the RCMP when they arrived. When she was halfway to the cars, he said she was ordered to lay on the ground with her hands over her head. All three Stanleys were then placed in seperate police vehicles, but Sheldon and Leesa were released shortly after.

SUV MATCHED DESCRIPTION OF PRIOR THEFT ATTEMPT

Earlier, RCMP Cst. Andrew Park testified about his response to the Stanley farm. He said he seized three expended cartridge casings in the yard along with a pistol inside a closet in the house.

Park said two women were also arrested. One he recalled was “crying hysterically” and couldn’t stop while the other seemed calm but also appeared heavily intoxicated.

He said that on the same day he was called to the Stanley farm, he also responded to a nearby farm for a report of a suspicious vehicle possibly trying to break into a red Dodge truck.

The suspicious vehicle was described as a grey SUV with a flat tire and a dragging muffler, a similar description to the vehicle Boushie and his friends were in.

Park said the red truck had scratch marks on one of its windows, and a broken rifle stock was found nearby.

He also explained how a barrel of a gun was found on the Stanley farm. He said his initial thought was that the stock and barrel found on the two farms were one in the same.

The testimony came a day after an RCMP investigator told the court there was no way to match the stock to the damaged rifle found near Boushie’s body.

Sheldon Stanley is expected to be cross-examined by his father’s defence lawyer through Wednesday afternoon.

—With files from 980 CJME’s Kevin Martel