It was as he banged on a stranger’s door for help — first with one hand, then both — that Dafonte Miller began to understand that he was hurt. Badly.

He knew he’d been hit to the point where he “wasn’t really feeling it no more.” The six-foot-four, 175-pound Miller had taken punches and kicks to his body, he claimed, from an off-duty cop and his brother. Just seconds before, the officer had struck him on the head with a metal pipe, Miller said.

But it wasn’t until he saw blood “pouring” onto the ground outside the home on the residential Whitby street where he’d sought help, to no avail, that Miller realized he was bleeding “profusely.”

By the time the Durham Regional Police arrived on the scene, all Miller could look at was the blood still pouring out of him.

“I didn’t think that I was going to make it to the hospital,” Miller told a rapt Oshawa courtroom.

Wearing a prosthesis where his left eye once was, the towering Miller sat in the witness box for the first time Wednesday during the criminal trial of Toronto police Const. Michael Theriault and his younger brother Christian Theriault.

Dafonte Miller testifies Toronto cop and brother hit him with metal pipe.

The brothers are jointly charged with aggravated assault and separately charged with attempting to obstruct justice in a December 2016 violent incident that seriously injured Miller, then 19. Both men have pleaded not guilty in the judge-alone trial before Superior Court Justice Joseph Di Luca.

With courtroom benches filled with supporters of both Miller and the Theriaults, the gallery fell silent as the soft-spoken Miller, 22, detailed his account of the night when he incurred multiple injuries, including an eyeball rupture that left him permanently blinded in one eye.

As court heard the frantic 911 call that Miller placed that day, some of his family and friends seated in benches near the front began crying.

“Hello, 911?” Miller can be heard saying, before Michael Theriault begins talking to the dispatcher, telling her he’s “on top of” Miller and that he’s under arrest.

Others silently wiped tears as they watched Miller flip through photographs of his injuries taken in the aftermath of the beating — close-ups of his bloodied face and shots of him lying in a hospital bed, a bandage covering his left eye.

“When I first came home and I saw myself with a patch,” Miller said, “I didn’t really look at myself for a while.”

A Whitby resident of about three years at the time of the incident, Miller had been living with his mother and siblings and performing manual labour for an electrician whenever he was needed.

According to his account, Miller had been hanging out with two friends, Antonio Jack and Bradley Goode, on the night of Dec. 27 and in the early hours of Dec. 28, 2016. They’d stopped at the home of another man, smoked some marijuana on the porch and made arrangements to meet up with some girls.

But when the girls weren’t ready to link up, Miller said the trio left and began walking. It was on Erickson Drive where he said the trio were stopped by two white men. One of the two, believed to be Christian Theriault, had longer hair, Miller said, while the other man had a shorter cut, believed to be Michael Theriault.

According to Miller, the men started asking what they were doing in the area and if they lived nearby. Miller then asked, “Why are we being questioned?” He claimed Michael Theriault said that because he’s a cop he can ask what he wants.

At that point, Miller said, the initially “casual” encounter became tense and that he, Goode and Jack began walking away. Miller recalled turning back and seeing that the two men were still in their driveway.

“Then we start to realize that we are being chased,” Miller said. “I started running.”

Miller testified that led to a beating that saw him kicked, punched and ultimately hit in the head with a pipe by “the one with shorter hair,” believed to be Michael Theriault. Some of the beating took place in between two houses on Erickson Drive and began when the brother with the longer hair put him in a headlock, face down, Miller said.

“I was feeling hits on my back,” he said. “I started to feel hits on my head.”

Then, Miller said, “I felt something harder hit my head,” which he said was a metal pipe. He could tell the difference between punches and the feeling of getting struck with the pipe, Miller testified.

Miller said he was getting hit “to the point where I wasn’t really feeling it no more, you know?” The hit to the head with the pipe was ultimately what “made me squirm out of the headlock,” he said.

“After a while I was like, I have to get up. I have to get up, I was telling myself.”

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He said he was able to get away and move towards the nearby home to bang on the door, where he continued to be hit in the head, Miller said. That’s where he noticed blood flowing from his face.

It was shortly after “when I realized that no help was coming” from the house he was knocking on, that Miller attempted to leave, but was stopped and held on the driveway by the short-haired man, he said.

“I just fell over. I guess my body just gave in,” Miller said.

He then attempted to call 911, but Michael Theriault took his phone away, Miller said.

Court has heard that the Theriault brothers say that on the night in question, they caught Miller and another man breaking into their parents’ truck, parked on the driveway of their family home on Erickson Drive.

The brothers chased after one of the men, later identified as Miller. They allege Miller ran away before attacking them with a pipe, and that they fought back in self-defence and feared for their lives. An approximately one-metre-long pipe has been entered into evidence at the trial.

Court has heard that Michael Theriault was not injured and that Christian Theriault suffered a cut to his hand and was later diagnosed with a concussion.

One of the other men Miller was with on the night in question testified that the trio had been “car-hopping” — moving from car to car to take any valuables found inside unlocked vehicles. The other man Miller was with has denied they were car-hopping.

Court has also heard from residents of Erickson Drive, including a Toronto Fire chief who alleges he heard and saw two men violently beating on a third outside his home, and that one of the men soon after came banging at his door so hard he thought it was going to break open.

Miller told the court it took months to recover from the beating, and for the first while he was sleeping in the same bed as his mother.

“My eye would bleed out every night, so she had to clean it up,” he said.

He has since undergone two surgeries and has a prosthetic left eye, though on Wednesday he wasn’t wearing one that looks like his right eye because it was being cleaned, he said. The other eye also suffered damage and is sensitive to light, he said.

For months after the incident he didn’t want to leave his house.

“I was just shaken up. I just looked different, didn’t want to be around people,” Miller said.

Acknowledging he still has ups and downs, Miller said he now feels “like I’m strong enough that I keep myself in a good place.”

“I’m pretty much the same person. I’m just more careful about my surroundings.”

Miller is back on the stand Thursday for cross-examination by Michael Lacy, a lawyer for Michael Theriault.

Wendy Gillis is a Toronto-based reporter covering crime and policing. Reach her by email at wgillis@thestar.ca or follow her on Twitter: @wendygillis

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