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Immediately after hearing a loud crash as he drove down Memorial Drive SE, one of two men standing in the road collapsed to the ground, a witness said in a homicide trial Friday.
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Michael Bui was one of several witnesses called by Crown prosecutor Tiffany Dwyer to describe the scene outside a southeast residence where Calgarian Jesse George was fatally shot.
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Bui told a 14-member jury that he and his girlfriend, Alicia Chudleigh, were driving westbound on Memorial, just past 52nd Street SE
“There were two individuals who were actually on the south side of Memorial,” Bui testified.
“They talked on the road, rather than the sidewalk.”
Bui said he then heard a bang and saw one guy fall and the other guy walk away.
Dwyer asked the witness what he thought the hard blow was.
“I didn’t know at first, kind of like a gunshot,” he said.
“It was just a hard blow.”
John Edward Tabler is charged with second-degree murder and Martin Wallace Yuen with manslaughter in connection with the shooting death of George on March 27, 2021.
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In her opening statement Thursday, Dwyer told jurors that George and his brother, Dwayne Crazyboy, went to Yuen’s home at 5227 Memorial Dr. went to see him.
But Yuen and George got into an argument before he and Tabler chased the man out of the residence, Dwyer said.
Outside, she said, Tabler used a firearm provided by Yuen to shoot George once in the neck.
Bui told the court that the man who fell on the road fell “almost immediately” after the impact before the other man started walking west on the road.
Under cross-examination by defense attorney Rebecca Snukal, who is acting for Yuen, the witness confirmed that the man walked away from her client’s residence.
Chudleigh also testified and told the court traffic had to swerve to avoid the two men on the road before she heard a gunshot and one fell to the ground.
Under questioning by defense attorney Andrea Urquhart, who is acting for Tabler, the woman said the two men were close together, about a foot apart.
And she said they seemed to be talking to each other, but she couldn’t make out what was being said.
Chudleigh also told Urquhart that while she heard a shot, she never saw a gun in the hands of the man standing.
The trial, which was adjourned for three weeks, resumes on Monday.
KMartin@postmedia.com
On Twitter: @KMartinCourts
