“Constable Nasser?”
Laura Bird, a rising star in the ɫɫ Crown attorney’s office, was in the back hallway of the North York courthouse when she spotted a young constable she knew. Bird’s boss had just assigned her the faltering Kim Golaub murder case. He wanted results.
Aman Nasser was just a few years on the job. He had started out in uniform but was now in plainclothes. He’d developed a reputation for getting to know people on the street. Figuring out “who’s who in the zoo” was how the veteran homicide detective on the Golaub case explained the officer’s role. To fit in on the streets, Nasser wore his long black hair in either cornrows, braids or a ponytail. He’d “debrief” people arrested for crimes. Not about what they were arrested for, but what else they knew.
“You want to be that copper that the squads come to, to go, Hey, who is this guy? Who’s that guy?” says retired homicide detective Doug Sansom.
Nasser was walking through that court hallway back in November 2011 whenBird stopped him. She mentioned the two co-accused on her murder case— Chris Sheriffe and Awet Asfaha. Ever heard of these guys?
Nasser said no. “But I’ll ask around.”
Aman Nasser, who was a constable with ɫɫ police, was an expert witness in the Kim Golaub case with a reputation for finding out about gang affiliations.
ɫɫ Star illustration using photo from Royal Roads University and DreamstimeThis was just over two years after the Golaub murder. Gang violence was high and police leaders and politicians wanted arrests and convictions. But despite the combinedresources of the homicide squad and the Guns and Gangs unit, they’d been unable to link the Golaub shooting to gang activity.
Homicide detectives had a theory— Chris and Awet were Crips gang members, they’d seen a man with a red shirt and figured he was part of the rival Bloods. But Awet and Chris had no known gang connections. Awet had some drug convictions, but nothing violent. Chris had no record at all. In fact, he had been a soccer star, was studying to be a carpenter, working two jobs. He didn’t fit the profile of a gang member. And Golaub was an innocent victim. No gang ties. He had just been stopping off to get a bite to eat.
A few days later, Const. Nasser was back. Yes, both Awet and Chris had gang connections. Two confidential informants had told him so.
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According to Nasser, his sources said Awet was “putting in work” with the Jamestown Crips. That meant he was doing drug deals to move up the ranks. “And Chris Sheriffe,” Nasser said, “he’s a gang leader and already had bodies to his name” at the time of the Golaub shooting. Nasser’s sources said the Golaub shooting was a case of mistaken identity,but it was linked to a back-and-forth Crips rivalry. The Bloods were not even involved.
This was exactly what Crown attorney Bird needed.
For Chris Sheriffe’s defence team, this was a last-minute shock. Veteran defence lawyer Christopher Hicks says he’d seen no signs Chris was in a gang.
Christopher Sheriffe as a young boy and with soccer teammates.
ɫɫ Star illustration using family photos, Dreamstime“He was a tremendous soccer player,” Hicks says. “He had real talent.He was intelligent. He was going to school. He didn’t have a criminal record.”
Having just scored a major victory— getting his client’s charge reduced from first-degree murder to accessory after the fact at the preliminary hearing — Hicks had felt like the case was going his way.
Chris “had a plausible story,” Hicks says. “He’d given his friend a lift after they’d been out partying with a couple of women on a Saturday night. And he stopped where he was told to stop. And his friend got out and went somewhere and came back and they drove off. I mean, it was a plausible enough story.”
Yet, Hicks was starting to have concerns about his client, specifically how he would appear in front of a jury in his trial. He was on bail— under house arrest — for two years. Only allowed out of the house for medical appointments and court appearances. During that time, some of his friends from the neighbourhood visited and they smoked marijuana together. (It was illegal at the time.) In the two years Chris was on bail, he fathered two children with different women. Hicks saw the perfect picture he wanted to paint for the jury fade.
In retrospect, Hicks wishes Chris had not made bail. “It always messes up. It seems to me that there’s always a downside to it. I don’t know why, but it just doesn’t work out.”
Defence lawyer Christopher Hicks said he was shocked by evidence purporting to show Chris was in a gang. Also pictured is the Sheriffes’ home at the time on Avening Avenue, where Chris stayed during house arrest.
ɫɫ Star illustration using photos from Steve Russell and DreamstimeThe next piece of bad news Hicks got was from the Superior Court of Justice. Bird had convinced Judge Faye McWatt to overturn the preliminary hearing judge’s decision to reduce the charges against both men.
Though the gang-related evidence was not yet part of the case (it would only emerge at trial), McWatt found there was enough evidence to proceed with the first-degree charges for both young men. As to Chris, McWatt said that even if Chris had no idea that a shooting was going to take place, he could be found guilty of first-degree murder if “he deliberately chose not to make inquiries when his suspicions about the shooter’s intent were aroused.” McWatt’s ruling does not provide any additional explanation.
Hicks could have appealed the McWatt ruling, but decided not to. A trial was scheduled for May 2012.Both men would face the charge of first-degree murder, meaning a killing that was planned and deliberate. Det. Sansom was pleased, and the new gang information would help at trial.
“You don’t have to prove motive” in a homicide trial, says Sansom. “But it really does help. It helps with the jury because they want to make sense of what the hell happened.”
Nasser prepared a report for the court with sparse details about his two sources. Under Canadian law, these sources can never be revealed. And they would never be cross-examined in court.
According to the report, Source No. 1 was a Jamestown Crips gang member. Source No. 2 was someone who had close friends who were members of the Jamestown Crips. The report said both received compensation for information provided to police. One got an undisclosed amount of cash and a break on criminal charges. The other received a break on charges.
One of the sources said Chris was a leader of the notorious “Hustle Squad,” a Crips subgroup. And the source provided a photo of 19-year-old Chris and nine friends— all young Black men— standing together. The source said this was the “Hustle Squad.”
Nasser’s report went one step further. He said one of the sources said Chris had been “roaming the streets” looking for a Mount Olive Crip named “DropZ” who’d been shooting up Jamestown. As the source’s story went, Chris and DropZ had a “beef” that began when Chris ripped a chain from DropZ’s neck. The source said that later, Chris went looking for DropZ as part of a back-and-forth retaliation and when Chris couldn’t find DropZ, he shot anybody because his gang “wanted blood.” (This story came up at trial, but it was never substantiated and appears, according to the Star’s investigation, to be untrue.)
Where co-accused Awet Asfaha fit was unclear. According to the sources, Awet was just trying to join the gang, but had not put in enough “work.”
The Supreme Court of Canada has made it very clear that the identity of confidential informants cannot be revealed publicly. In this case, that included keeping secret the type of charges lowered or dropped in return for information,and how much cash was paid to one of the sources, under the theory that this might reveal their identity to other gang members.
Thoughsecrecy is the law, Hicks said it didn’t sit well with him.
“I was very suspicious of these confidential informants that appeared so suddenly.”
In an interview with the Star, Nasser (now an inspector with the Surrey Police Service in B.C.) said his informants back when he was a young ɫɫ officer were solid, particularly when it came to Chris Sheriffe.
“Not a lot of people had dealt with him, but he had a very, very strong reputation in the ɫɫ area, in the West End. And he was a feared person,” Nasser said.
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Bird, now a judge in the Superior Court of Justice, “respectfully declined comment” on her time prosecuting the case, a spokesperson said, explaining that judges are bound by ethical guidelines that prevents them from “speaking publicly about a case they prosecuted or defended.”
Leading up to the trial, the Crown’s plan was to use these informantsin a completely different way than they had ever been used in the Canadian court system. Normally, police use confidential informants’ information to help them obtain a search warrant from a judge. The informant tells a police officer there are guns in apartment X, for example, and the officer refers to this in their application for the warrant.
But in this case, the Crown’s plan was for Nasser to testify about what his sources were alleging. If this was allowed, it would be the first time this happened in a Canadian court, according to Crown attorneys and defence lawyers interviewed by the Star, and a search of legal databases.Normally, when someone levels an accusation in a court case, the defence has the right of cross-examination. You put the witness on the stand. Ask questions. Test credibility.
It would be up to the trial judge to decide if Nasser’s testimony would be allowed.
Meanwhile, Chris Sheriffe remained out on bail, at home with his parents on house arrest. The case against him was getting stronger. Police and prosecutors wondered: What else could they get before trial?
