KAMLOOPS, B.C. — A murdered teen's stepfather struggled with emotion as he recounted one of the last messages from a girl he had known since she was two years old.
"'Dad, I have something to tell you — I'm pregnant,'" Glen Wilson testified Tuesday, recalling the text he received from CJ Fowler hours before she was found dead near a creek on Dec. 5, 2012.
Her airway had been crushed by a 25-kilogram concrete block.
Fowler's boyfriend Damien Taylor is on trial for second-degree murder.
"I said, 'I'm happy,'" Wilson told the jury about his 16-year-old stepdaughter. "But, Damien had to find a job and CJ would have to start school or do something."
Taylor, who was then 21, moved into Wilson's home in Terrace to live with Fowler.
Wilson testified that Fowler called him "Dad" while Taylor referred to him as "Poppa."
Wilson told the jury he agreed to let Taylor move in.
"She wasn't going to school," he said of Fowler. "We tried getting her into school and tried to get Damien a job."
But, neither attempt was successful. The two were "inseparable," Wilson said, spending all their time together.
While he was worried the pair had too much time on their hands, trouble didn't start until a friend of Fowler's from Kamloops came to visit and stayed over in late November 2012.
Wilson said he came home from a trip to Kitimat to find Fowler and two friends high on what he guessed was a mixture of cocaine and chemicals.
Wilson kicked the friends out and Fowler left with them. She returned home days later, but told her stepfather she wanted to go to Kamloops with Taylor and her friends.
Less than a week later, beginning in the early evening of Dec. 4, 2012, Wilson said he texted back and forth with Fowler from 8 p.m. to the early hours of the next day, when she was killed.
Fowler told him she thought she was doing speed, or crystal meth, but her friend may have given her another drug.
Chest pains forced her to go to hospital. It was there that Fowler and Taylor were told she was pregnant, news she texted her stepfather and posted on Facebook.
As the trial opened Monday, prosecutor Alexandra Janse said the Crown will provide evidence, captured on video and from a witness, that the couple was arguing when they left the hospital.
The last text Wilson received from Fowler, at about 3 a.m. on Dec. 5, 2012, said, "I love you Dad. We miss you."
Wilson testified he tried to contact Fowler at about 8 a.m., texting her: "Are you awake?" There was no reply.
Court has heard that dog walkers found Fowler's body in the Guerin Creek area.
Wilson bought Greyhound tickets for Fowler and Taylor for the noon bus, but Taylor made the trip north by himself.
Police found Fowler's ripped-up ticket in Taylor's hotel room in Prince George, along with socks with traces of her blood on them in a garbage can.
