KAMLOOPS, B.C. — An Ashcroft, B.C., resident who stepped outside for a smoke may have witnessed the beating death of his neighbour with a shovel, a murder trial has heard.
Gil Anderson testified in B.C. Supreme Court on Tuesday about what he saw and heard on June 2, 2014, the day a man is accused of fatally attacking his uncle.
Shane Gyoba, 29, is charged with second-degree murder in connection with the death of Ed Gyoba.
Court heard Anderson called police in the town west of Kamloops, B.C., just under an hour after he went outside for a morning cigarette and heard a shouting match.
It was just before 8:40 a.m. when Anderson, who lived across the street from Shane Gyoba's home, went to investigate the sounds by walking around the side of his house to the driveway.
He peered through bushes and saw two people on the man's front lawn, but couldn't quite see their faces, he testified.
"I saw the silhouette on the left attack the one on the right. The one on the right tried to defend itself and the one on the left pursued until the one on the right fell down," he said.
Anderson said he then saw the attacker pick up something from the ground and start swinging.
"I could see the long handle and I wasn't quite sure what it was until I heard the shovel, the first strike," he said.
He heard a garbled voice and a groan, then what he believed to be two more strikes.
"It was a reverberating metal sound and a loud thump."
Then there was silence, he said.
Anderson told court he was shaken and first convinced himself what happened wasn't real.
The man walked directly past Gyoba’s yard to bring his daughter to school, without looking at the scene, he said.
"I could hear the sound of digging as I walked by — the sound of the shovel moving earth."
After the man returned home he decided to call police.
"I think at that point I'd accepted what I'd seen," he said.
"I'd come to the conclusion that I actually did just see that — that somebody had been assaulted and beat with a shovel 20 feet away."
A police witness earlier testified investigators found a broken shovel on Gyoba's property.
The trial before judge alone is expected to wrap up next week.
