The melee on Sept. 16, 2022, left 18-year-old Marcus Maloney dead and two others, both 20, injured.
Mohamed Osman testified in his own defence Wednesday as he repeatedly claimed he had no intention of killing 18-year-old Marcus Maloney in the midst of a melee between two groups of young men inside the St. Laurent Shopping Centre on Sept. 16, 2022.
Osman, who was 18 at the time and turned 20 in June, told the jury he meant to stab Maloney in the shoulder when he ran out of the Dollarama store wielding a stolen kitchen knife in his right hand.
Maloney blocked the first blow, Osman said.
“I went to go stab him again. He went to punch at me … I didn’t see exactly where I hit him,” Osman testified. “I didn’t mean to stab him in the neck.”
Maloney died of blood loss after the knife struck seven centimetres deep at the base of his neck, severing a major artery and puncturing his left lung.
“I feel terrible, sir,” Osman said under questioning from defence lawyer Ewan Lyttle. “I didn’t want him to die.”
Osman pleaded not guilty to second-degree murder and two counts of aggravated assault at the outset of his jury trial last week, though he admitted stabbing Maloney and two of his friends.
Crown attorneys Robin McLachlen and John Semenoff closed their case on Monday after calling their final witnesses, Jacob Grant-Dallaire and Denis Plumb, two of Maloney’s friends, who came to his defence and were also stabbed that day.
The prosecutors asked the jury to consider the decisions Osman made in those moments and his “intentions, his reasons and his motivations for doing what he did.”
Osman moved from the prisoner’s box to the witness stand on Wednesday and told the jury he had stopped at the mall that day on his way home with a friend, Nasir, and said he didn’t go looking for a fight.
Evening Update
He had no idea that his friend had been involved in an incident on an OC Transpo bus the previous day and said he “panicked” when his friend was confronted at the mall by a group of six young men who were “older, bigger and stronger” than they were around 4:30 p.m. that day.
Maloney was four days shy of his 19th birthday when he was fatally stabbed, while Grant-Dallaire and Plumb were both 20 at the time.
According to the Crown’s case summary, Maloney and his friends had gone to the St-Laurent mall “to stick up for a friend and co-worker” who had been harassed by a group of teenagers on a city bus the previous day.
They recognized Osman’s friend as one of the teens from the bus by his distinctive backpack.
Osman testified the group was “very aggressive, very angry” as they started swearing at him and his friend in the hallway outside the Dollarama store.
“I went to go look for a weapon because there was six of them and two of us. They were bigger and stronger and they wanted to fight,” he testified. “I was scared I was going to be badly beaten or killed.”
His initial intention in grabbing the kitchen knife was to scare the group off, he testified.
While briefly inside the store, he heard his friend “yelling and screaming” and heard others swearing “followed by a loud crashing sound.”
The jury was shown surveillance video of the fight as one of Maloney’s group engaged in a one-on-one fight with Osman’s friend and they went crashing to the floor outside the store, near a busy mall exit.
Osman was challenged in the Crown’s cross-examination by Semenoff, who said Osman took only “one second” to assess the threat his friend was facing when he exited the store, ducked around the store security guard with the knife at his hip, then used “deadly force” against Maloney.
“Within one second of leaving the store, your arm is raised to stab Marcus Maloney,” Semenoff said.
Neither Maloney nor his other friends had joined in the one-on-one “fair fight” and had not engaged with anyone physically in the moments before they were stabbed.
“I didn’t think a fight was going to happen. I went to get a weapon to scare them away,” Osman testified. “It was too late for that. I saw my friend on the floor surrounded by a bunch of people, and he was on the floor with one guy on top of him … My mind was racing, I was panicking, I didn’t know if Nasir was being stabbed or beaten, and I saw Mr. Maloney standing near his head.”
Osman said he thought his friend was in danger of being kicked and feared he could be stabbed, though no other knife was seen.
“As soon as I came out (of the Dollarama), Mr. Maloney turned toward me, so I figured he was trying to stop me from getting to Nasir,” Osman said. “My intention was to stab him in the back or shoulder, but he went to punch and I didn’t know where I hit him.”
Osman aimed for the shoulder because he “didn’t think anything important was up here,” he said, motioning to his upper torso area.
“My intention was not to kill Mr. Maloney, but to move him away from my friend,” he said.
As Maloney screamed and staggered back, his friends stepped in and started directing punches at Osman.
“Three of his friends started punching me in the head. I fought back with the knife in my hand,” Osman said Wednesday. “I didn’t stab anywhere in particular.”
Grant-Dallaire was stabbed twice on his left torso and shoulder; Plumb was stabbed in the left shoulder and collarbone area, and prosecutors said the strap on his backpack may have saved him from more severe injuries.
His friends didn’t realize Osman had a knife until after the fight, when both young men noticed they were bleeding and saw Maloney struggling and clutching the fatal wound at the base of his neck.
Maloney was treated by paramedics, but never regained vital signs and was pronounced dead shortly after arriving at a hospital. Grant-Dallaire and Plumb spent four days recovering in hospital and both testified they still felt lingering effects from their injuries.
Prosecutors produced a letter that Osman wrote to his family five days after the stabbing, when he told them: “I know they were trying to stab us.”
“Nobody ever mentioned a knife” before the fight, Semenoff countered, no physical violence had yet erupted and Osman was not the target of any threat when he decided to arm himself.
“Nowadays a lot of people in Ottawa carry knives,” Osman replied. “I assumed (Nasir) was getting stabbed. At that time, I’m not thinking rationally. I was scared, and, when you’re scared you don’t think, just act.”
Maloney and Grant-Dallaire were both carrying folding knives concealed in their pockets when their group confronted Osman and his friend. Plumb was carrying a backpack containing a hammer and a box-cutter, but, as the Crown told the jury in its opening address, none of those knives or tools “were used, seen, or even mentioned” before or during the melee.
When asked by his defence lawyer whether Osman — who stood five feet nine inches tall and weighed about 100 pounds in 2022 — could have stopped the group without a weapon, he replied, “No, sir.”
Semenoff challenged Osman on that point and asked why he didn’t do the “logical thing” and seek help from the six-foot-four, 250-pound security guard standing nearby in the Dollarama.
“Your preference was to go into the Dollarama, steal a knife and sneak it past the security guard. You even ducked,” Semenoff told Osman. “You would rather do that — and engage this group with a knife — than to get the big security guard standing right there to intervene?”
Osman told the prosecutor he “wasn’t thinking straight” when he “thought something terrible was happening” to his friend.
“And, if your intent was to scare them away with a knife, then why conceal the knife?” Semenoff asked.
“It was too late for that,” Osman replied.
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