At some point, somebody might want to remind James Forcillo that neither he nor anyone else was actually stabbed on the night he shot and killed a knife-wielding teenager aboard an empty streetcar.

Since the police officer, who’s spent the past five days in the witness stand — three of them under sometimes combative cross-examination — is now back safe in his seat alongside defence counsel, that factual prompt might have to take place beyond the jury’s sight and hearing.

So often has the Toronto constable repeated what he visualized in those crucial seconds around midnight, July 26, 2013, that the attack which never was seems almost to have unfolded as he feared it would — Sammy Yatim lunging over the stairwell to come at him with a switchblade. That is filling in a honking huge supposition blank.

But it’s the crux of the thing, of Forcillo’s defence.

“His intent was clear,” Forcillo testified on Tuesday, in almost word-for-word justification for the shooting — nine bullets fired in two separate volleys, eight finding their target — that he’s given again and again. “This man was deciding to come off the streetcar.”

He saw it in Yatim’s eyes, the tensing of his muscles and most particularly the “flick” of the knife.

Flick is a loaded word. It implies menace.

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What Forcillo saw, what’s visible on the various videos that captured the incident, is a knife, in Yatim’s right hand, which moves fractionally downwards and then back up again. Was that a flick with intent, an ominous and threatening gesture, or merely a muscle twitch, an unsteady motion by a suspect in a state of perplexity with ecstasy in his system?

We’ll never know the truth. Only Forcillo is left alive to surmise.

Just the officer has claimed that, though already hit by three bullets — one of which shattered Yatim’s spine, paralyzing him from the waist down, one fracturing his arm, one, the fatal shot, damaging his heart — the teen, having dropped to the floor of the streetcar, had reached over with his left arm to scoop the released knife into back into his right hand. The alleged purpose — so the constable believed — was to take another stab at this presumed springing assault. Yet the grainy video is moot on that crucial point; whether Yatim has re-grasped the knife is unclear. Clear enough in Forcillo’s mind, however, so that he fired his gun six more times.

Prosecutor Milan Rupic has relentlessly accused the defendant — who’s pleaded not guilty to second-degree murder — of being angry during the confrontation because Yatim would not heed his bellowed orders to “Drop the knife,” of reacting with unwarranted lethal force rather than attempting to de-escalate the crisis and now retroactively justifying his trigger finger.

“It was an after-the-fact rationalization for shooting Sammy Yatim when you didn’t have to,” said Rupic.

Forcillo countered: “It was absolutely reasonable because I believed my life was in danger. If I would have done nothing he would have stabbed me. He was the one who forced my hand.’’

Rupic hammered away at his premise that there was never sufficient cause for Forcillo to fire. “You’re giving that phoney explanation because you now realize that there was no reason to shoot Sammy Yatim.”

The officer, said Rupic, was provoked into shooting by Yatim’s jeers and alleged defiance.

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Forcillo: “I’m very much telling the truth. I cannot make this more clear. At no point was I angry.”

And at no point, Forcillo added, did he say to the teen, as Rupic suggested: “I will f---ing pop you.”

Throughout the taut episode, Forcillo remained on the street, about 10 feet from Yatim, surrounded by eight other officers, some with weapons drawn, some not. The teenager never stepped down into the stairwell, remaining inside the open front doors, either yelling out “pussy” or stating a blunt “no” to the officer’s commands that he drop the knife, that he not take even one step forward.

Rupic resurrected the testimony of an earlier expert witness who determined that Yatim had moved forward on the streetcar by 50 centimetres following Forcillo’s initial commands — what the officer has characterized as indicating the suspect’s threatening state of mind. That expert witness estimated Yatim would have been moving at an average speed of .357 metres per second. Or 1.28 km an hour, Rupic noted. “That’s much slower than walking pace.”

Forcillo: “I’d say it was an initial move that could have changed into a charge ... off the streetcar.”

Rupic: “You shot Sammy Yatim on a hunch that he was coming down those stairs.”

Forcillo: “No, it wasn’t a hunch, believe me.” Adding: “I’ve replayed this a million times in my mind. This is what I believe in my core: Mr. Yatim was coming down off that streetcar.”

Rupic: “You had no reason to believe he was coming down the stairs.”

Forcillo: “I 100 per cent believed that he was coming off the streetcar. Sammy Yatim was advancing towards me with a knife.”

“He had the temerity to move, at a snail’s pace, and mock you,” said Rupic.

Forcillo: “I was not angry. He was not mocking. It’s not about being the ‘boss of a situation,’ ” a phrase Rupic had flung at the witness derisively. “I shot Mr. Yatim because I believed him to be an imminent threat to my life. Not because he moved, because he was an imminent threat.”

Rather than flicking the knife, as Forcillo has maintained, the teenager was preparing to hand it over, Rupic proposed. “I suggest that you were not facing the proverbial knife, but he was in the process of putting the knife down when you decided to shoot.”

In the short redirect that concluded the day, and Forcillo’s testimony, defence lawyer Peter Brauti revisited that part of the cross where Rupic probed why the constable had not considered alternate measures, including pepper spray. Rupic had even suggested that the protocol when pepper spray is used — having to then change his clothes, having to scrub down at a police wash station for the purpose — had been a discouraging factor in that decision.

Forcillo: “Out of the many suggestions Mr. Rupic put to me, that’s got to be the most insulting. That I’m such a callous person that I’d rather kill someone than change my uniform and take a shower.”