Update: Feb. 14 - Stanley Rudolph was in the kitchen of 123 College Street in Antigonish when a man with a badly swollen and bleeding eye came in, grabbed a bottle and attempted to break it.
Rudolph grabbed his arm and told him to put the bottle down which the man did.
A minute later the man again attempted to grab another bottle. Again Rudolph grabbed him. Around the same time Rudolph saw Josh MacKeigan in an argument with another man. Their argument soon turned physical and Rudolph tried to help his friend. When he looked up seconds later he saw the man with the swollen eye with a knife in his hand. Rudolph jumped back in fear and left the room. He said things are hard to remember after he saw the knife. Later he came back though and saw MacKeigan lying on the floor bleeding badly.
Rudolph didn't realize at the time he was holding the man with the swollen eye that he had gotten some blood on his shirt. That blood was later identified as Robert Lamb's.
Lamb is charged with second degree murder in the death of Jonathan Beaton that night.
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“He’s dying. He’s dying,” Chantelle Desmond’s voice is heard above shouts and screams outside 123 College St. in Antigonish on a 911 recording from Jan. 1, 2010, which was played in Nova Scotia Supreme Court in Pictou Monday.
Desmond was standing in front of the home where just minutes earlier fights had broken out and two men had been stabbed. About 15 feet from her Jonathan Beaton lay with a fatal wound in his abdomen.
Robert Lamb, 22, is charged with second-degree murder in Beaton’s death that night, but has pleaded not guilty. His jury trial began last Tuesday and continues this week.
Desmond pleads over and over again with the 911 operator to send an ambulance right away. He assures her he has as he asks more questions. He is heard asking her if the person responsible for the stabbing has left.
She says yes and that she saw them fleeing.
“I know who they are,” she tells the operator.
She told the court that she saw Julian Chittick, Chris Fordham and Megan Pelly flee the scene. Other witnesses who testified also reported seeing Robert Lamb and Trevor Hannan fleeing with the group, with Chittick, Hannan and Lamb leaving first and Fordham and Pelly leaving later. A surveillance video shows Chittick, Hannan and Lamb running through the parking lot of R.K. MacDonald nursing home across the street.
Defence lawyer Don Murray questioned Desmond about whether she saw anyone actually stab anyone else. She said no. He then argued that she really didn’t know that the attacker or attackers had left.
She said she was sure it had to be the men from Dartmouth, pointing out that they were the only ones who weren’t familiar to the group.
“Why would anyone else we knew do it?” she asked.
Desmond’s twin sister Cassandra Desmond also was at the party and shared her account of what happened. Cassandra said she was sitting in the living room when a fight broke out between Jerry LeDrew and Robert Lamb over a chain LeDrew was wearing and Lamb asked for. She thought it was settled but soon another fight broke out, so she decided to leave, she said. As she went back to grab her purse Chris Fordham jumped on a fussball table with a broken bottle in his hand. "Who wants to f--- around now," he said. As he jumped down the bottle sliced Cassandra's hand and she fled the house. Minutes later Megan Pelly and her boyfriend Fordham came out. She began yelling at the pair when someone shouted that someone had been stabbed. Fordham ran back in when he heard that, she testified. The next thing she saw was Beaton coming out, stumble down and crawl to the sidewalk. She ran to him, turned him over and saw a severe wound. "I'm going to die," she reported him as saying. Jerry LeDrew, another witness who saw Beaton fall and crawl to the sidewalk also was on the stand this morning.
Under cross examination it came out that he told police the day Jonathan Beaton was stabbed that he saw two knives in the man and according to a transcript of that testimony presented, described in detail Beaton pulling two knives out. In court Monday morning he said he actually only saw one knife and had just been going by what others told him.
One of the residents of the house, J.D. Chisholm, also took the stand. He said the party was only supposed to be a gathering of some friends, but soon more and more people started to show up.
He was drinking heavily during the evening and was heavily intoxicated at the time of the stabbings, he said.
He described being hit by a bottle or glass in the living room, but said he didn’t know who did it. The blow sliced his eyelid. He also had a cut on his arm and near his lip which he doesn’t remember getting.
He later went into the kitchen and saw Josh MacKeigan lying under the kitchen table with stab wounds in his back.
The trial continues this morning at 9:30 a.m.
