A Halifax Regional Police dog followed a track after a homicide at a Dartmouth apartment building to a church parking lot on a nearby street before the trail went cold, the animal’s handler has testified.
Const. Joey Malcolm was one of six police officers who took the stand in Nova Scotia Supreme Court in Halifax on Tuesday at the trial of two people accused of killing Nadia Gonzales at 33 Hastings Dr. on the night of June 16, 2017.
Calvin Maynard Sparks, 26, of Dartmouth and Samanda Rose Ritch, 22, of Halifax, are charged with first-degree murder and attempting to murder John Patterson, a Hants County senior who went to the building with Gonzales and another man that evening.
Gonzales, a 35-year-old mother of two from Hammonds Plains, was attacked in the hallway on the top floor of the four-storey building. She was stabbed 37 times and put in a hockey bag that was discovered on a landing in one of the building’s back stairwells.
Malcolm told the court he and his German shepherd, Casey, began their search in the backyard of a home on nearby Prince Arthur Avenue after learning two people had been seen running through there shortly after the stabbing.
He said the dog followed the track through shrubs into a neighbouring yard on Hastings Drive and then out the driveway of that property and onto the sidewalk.
Malcolm said the animal continued up the sidewalk on Hastings Drive and through two front yards before taking the officer up a hilly path to the parking lot of the Catholic church on Gaston Road.
“The track just ended,” Malcolm said.
The officer said he took the dog around the church parking lot and onto neighbouring Regency Drive, but they were unable to pick up a scent.
Malcolm explained that early in the search, after he lifted the dog over a fence between the Prince Arthur Avenue and Hastings Drive properties, he saw an orange-handled knife with a black blade at the base of shrubs by the fence.
“It was really easy to see,” he said of the knife.
“I immediately identified it as something of interest or of evidentiary value,” he said.
“I didn’t touch it. I left it there and made sure somebody stayed there with it.”
Malcolm said the dog didn’t notice the knife, probably because the scent of the track it was following was so strong.
“It was a very dynamic situation,” he said. “We’re running. We’re moving very quickly.”
On cross-examination by Malcolm Jeffcock, Sparks’ lawyer, the handler admitted that he and the dog did not go to the rear door of 33 Hastings Dr. to initiate a track.
The officer agreed he did not receive any information that other persons may have been in the area.
On Tuesday, the jury also heard from officers who were involved in the arrests of Sparks and Ritch the next morning at two addresses on Federal Avenue in Halifax. The officers said both accused had bandages on their hands
Another officer who took Sparks back to police headquarters for forensic processing said he did not want to have his hands swabbed for DNA samples. After swabs were taken, he said Sparks, still wearing the bandages on his hands, asked to use the washroom.
He said he heard the toilet flush three times while Sparks was in the bathroom. When Sparks came out, the bandages were gone, and police were unable to locate them in the bathroom.
The final two witnesses of the day were RCMP digital forensic officers who extracted data from four cellphones seized by police. The officers explained how they generated extraction reports for investigators but did not testify about any messages they found.
Earlier in the trial, Patterson, 72, said he accompanied Gonzales on deliveries of crack cocaine. He said Sparks and Ritch attacked Gonzales and him after she knocked on the door of Wayne Bruce’s apartment on the top floor of the apartment building.
Patterson suffered six stab wounds before escaping the building and collapsing on the lawn of a school across the street. When police arrived, they learned there was a woman in a hockey bag in the west stairwell.
A knife was also in the hockey bag. A piece of blade that appears to have broken off it was found on the floor in the fourth-floor hallway, near the door to the stairwell.
In his opening statement to the jury, Crown attorney Steve Degen said after her arrest, Ritch told an undercover police officer in a cell next to hers at the police station that her ex had stabbed a woman 30 times and put her in a duffel bag. Ritch told the officer that they had gone through the woman’s cellphone and found text messages to cops that showed she was “snitching hard-core.”
The trial is in its third week, with Justice Christa Brothers presiding. It is scheduled to run until Nov. 29.
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