GRAND FALLS-WINDSOR, NFLD.— Lee Harshbarger made his way through the wet reed grass and mud until he came to a bouquet of roses and daisies tied with a bright red ribbon lying on the ground.

The 77-year-old retiree had been here with his family the night before — the fourth anniversary of the day his son Mark Harshbarger fell to the ground on that same spot. He was shot with a hunting rifle by his wife Mary Beth Harshbarger, who claims she mistook him for a bear.

“Tears automatically came to my eyes,” Lee Harshbarger said, referring to when the RCMP officer who led the investigation into his son’s death pointed out where it had actually happened. “I didn’t want to be that way, but they did. There was no way I could prevent it.

“I’ll probably never see it again, but it was worth a lot to me to be able to come back and see this,” Lee Harshbarger told reporters who accompanied him back to the site Wednesday.

Earlier, Lee Harshbarger sat still and silent in a darkened courtroom in Grand Falls-Windsor as a flat television screen played just over half an hour of footage of that same grassy parking area on the edge of the thick bush.

The video was made by RCMP officers on Sept. 16, 2006, two days after Mark Harshbarger, 43, was killed when his wife fired a shot at dusk while the couple was on a hunting trip.

Mary Beth Harshbarger, 45, has been charged with criminal negligence causing death and faces four years to life in prison if she is convicted.

She has been in Newfoundland since she was extradited from her home in rural Pennsylvania last May.

The videotape showed the first of two re-enactments that police officers staged — the second one was done a year later on Sept. 13, 2007 — to try and get a sense of how the light conditions at the time of the incident may have affected the sequence of events.

They set up a video camera on a tripod and then had someone roughly the same height and build as the victim — and wearing dark clothing instead of the bright orange safety vest, which Mark Harshbarger had not been wearing at the time of his death — walk around in the area at dusk.

Others observed the movement both with the naked eye and through the scope of a rifle from the same spot where the accused had been standing.

RCMP Corp. Doug Hewitt, the principal investigator for the case, told the court he came away from the re-enactment experience with the impression that the accused very well could have been telling the truth when she said she thought the shape she saw moving through the bushes was not her husband, but a bear.

“It was plausible that Mary Beth saw what she thought was a bear. It was pretty low light conditions,” Hewitt testified in the Supreme Court of Newfoundland and Labrador Wednesday, where Mary Beth Harshbarger is being tried by judge alone. “It was so dark with the naked eye all I could see was some black movement, some black mass, is what I would call it, moving through the woods.”

Hewitt later added that he thought “a shot had been taken in too dark a lighting condition”.

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Lee Harshbarger said he came to the same conclusion after visiting the site on the anniversary and waiting around for 7:55 p.m., which is when investigators believe the shooting happened, to see what the light would be like.

“At first I thought that if she could see well enough to hit him dead centre, then she could see enough to tell it was a man,” said the father, who has expressed his doubts about her story. “I sort of changed my opinion when I was out here last night and saw how dark it was. My God, nobody should have shot anything at all.”