Police video of eyewitness in death of Darcy Allan Sheppard

NOW Magazine has published new police video of Witness 9.12 in Michael Bryant’s killing of Darcy Allan Sheppard. The video is a police interview that took place a few hours after Bryant killed Sheppard.

Filmmaker Wayne Scott wrote an exclusive article for NOW regarding the release of this and other evidence in his upcoming documentary on the case.

From NOW:

“Much of what you will see and hear in Witness 9.12, the nine-minute video accompanying this story, is being viewed publicly for the first time.

Almost all of the material is from Toronto Police Service files relating to the 2009 investigation that led to criminal negligence causing death and dangerous driving causing death charges against former Ontario Attorney General Michael Bryant in the motor vehicle-related death of cyclist Darcy Allan Sheppard.

Virtually all of this information was buried from public view for five years after all charges against Bryant were withdrawn by Richard Peck, the specially-appointed, independent prosecutor from B.C. assigned to oversee the case.”

Darcy Allan Sheppard – Witness 9.12 from NOW Magazine on Vimeo.

“Michael Bryant Killed my Son”

Allan Sheppard appeared on Jesse Brown’s CANADALAND to talk about newly revealed evidence to the public in the case against Michael Bryant.

Listen to the podcast on CANADALAND and read the transcript of the new audio

“CANADALAND has obtained two eyewitness accounts of the death of Darcy Allan Sheppard. Neither has been publicly released before.  They tell a very different tale of the death of Darcy Allan Sheppard than what the media has previously reported. They are followed by an interview with Sheppard’s father, Allan Sheppard”

Episode Rundown

[00:00:20] “On August 31st, 2009 Darcy Allan Sheppard was killed on Bloor Street West. Michael Bryant the former attorney general of Ontario was charged with criminal negligence causing death and dangerous driving causing death. In the immediate aftermath much was made of Bryant’s reputation for pugnacious, aggressive behaviour the term road rage came up many times. The press paid close attention to the fact that Bryant almost instantly hired Navigator as his crisis PR team and Marie Henein as his criminal defense lawyer. But then as the days progressed the media’s focus shifted, it shifted away from Bryant’s reputation and onto Darcy Allan Sheppard’s. Sheppard we were told was a squeegee punk, bike messenger, a drunk also, aggressive and confrontational. Less than a year later all charges against Michael Bryant was dropped. The crown prosecutor proclaimed that Sheppard had been the aggressor and produced a photo of Darcy Allan Sheppard mohawked and half naked, screaming into the driver’s side window of a different car. Since then Michael Bryant has been telling his side of the story again and again.” Jesse

Wayne Scott has obtained and provided to CANADALAND audio tape of the two closest eyewitnesses to the initial altercation between Bryant and Sheppard.

Eyewitnesses Consistently Portray Michael Bryant as Aggressor

In the court transcripts of the case against Michael Bryant, special prosecutor Richard Peck made some comments as to the credibility and the nature of witness statements.

In this case eyewitnesses are people who were either in cars or on the street, in some cases within a few feet of the altercations. Some of them called 911 and sat with police for video interviews. Some of them spoke to the media, and related what they saw. Their witness testimonies were in some cases recorded mere minutes after the events while things were fresh in their minds. Because Bryant fled the scene of the initial accident, dragging Sheppard along the road, it was very difficult for any one witness to see the entire events that night. However it does not diminish the credibility of their description of the events they saw in person.

In the court transcripts Peck basically retold Bryant’s version of the events without challenging them and attempted to use Bryant’s words to supersede the testimony of independent eyewitnesses. Peck cherry picked parts of the witness’s statement that could be manipulated to support Bryant and ignored explicit statements from the very same witnesses that showed Bryant to be the aggressor intending to cause harm to Sheppard.

Peck notes:

“The police took statements from numerous eyewitnesses in the area. The witnesses described seeing and hearing aspects of what occurred. No single witness appears to have observed the events from start to finish. There are both consistencies and inconsistencies in their evidence.”

In a telephone call for Jennifer Well’s Toronto Star report on the case (Lost Boy: The death of Darcy Allan Sheppard) Richard Peck continued to claim inconsistencies among the witnesses.

“There were quite disparate accounts of what happened from eyewitnesses or alleged eyewitnesses,” he says. “There were at least a dozen and they were quite disparate in terms of what they saw, or purported to see, the speeds, the interactions, all those types of things.”

Toronto lawyer Mark Sandler, who has many connections to Michael Bryant and who managed the case for Peck chimed in, “as is often the case when you’ve got a reconstruction of a traffic-related matter, the eyewitness accounts are wildly at variance with each other,” Sandler says.

So let’s look at the witness statements and compare them to each other and Bryant’s self-serving version of the events that he came up with immediately after receiving full disclosure of the Crown’s case.

Organized attempt to supress eyewitness video in Michael Bryant case

As more evidence continues to be discovered and revealed in Michael Bryant’s road rage killing of Darcy Allan Sheppard, there is an effort by a person or person to suppress the evidence in Canada.

On September 1, 2009 CTV aired video interviews of two construction workers at the scene of Sheppard’s death. The video also appeared on the Globe and Mail’s site. It was taken down after a few days but MessMedia/Bryantwatch put it up on youtube. It remained there for five years.

Recently someone had the video blocked in Canada due to a “defamation” complaint. This is curious because at the time the video was made the identities of the driver were unknown and unnamed. No one is identified in the video. They are referred to as the “driver” and the “cyclist”

Here is the link to the original video You can still watch the video on vimeo here.

Eyewitnesses to a killing by a motorist in Toronto from Mess Media on Vimeo.