Legal arguments are being heard in a Hamilton court today for two men charged with first-degree murder in the death of Tim Bosma.

Dellen Millard, 30, and Mark Smich, 28, are charged in the killing of the Ancaster man, who disappeared May 6, 2013 after taking two men for a test drive in his truck.

They have both pleaded not guilty.

The trial resumed Monday morning, but the jury was dismissed for the day at around 11:15 a.m. as legal arguments continued before Justice Andrew Goodman.

The Crown says Bosma was shot in his truck, his body then burned in an incinerator outside Millard's air hangar at the Region of Waterloo International Airport.

Millard’s former roommate Andrew Michalski had been scheduled to testify Monday.

On Thursday, another friend of Millard’s broke down on the stand he recounted his lies and omissions to police after Millard was arrested.

In three separate statements to police back in 2013, Matt Hagerman failed to mention a toolbox Millard had delivered to him in his parents' driveway around 4 a.m. on May 10.

It wasn't until his fourth statement on May 30 — after consulting a lawyer — that Hagerman mentioned the early-morning hand-off.

Millard — who looked uncharacteristically dishevelled that morning, Hagerman recalled — had asked him to hang onto it for a couple of weeks. When Hagerman asked what was wrong, Millard told him it was better if he didn't know.

Millard was arrested just hours later.

Hagerman said he assumed the toolbox contained drugs — he'd seen Millard pull out the toolbox at parties before, and that's what it had always been for.

The Crown asserts it contained a gun.

On May 11, the day after he got it, Hagerman got a text from his friend (and Millard's roommate) Andrew Michalski, about a “mission.”

“It's about the thing someone gave you,” Michalski wrote cryptically.

When they met up, Hagerman learned Michalski had similarly been left with a backpack, which smelled of weed.

Michalski said Millard wanted the stuff to get to Smich. Hagerman said he did not want to meet up with Smich — whom he found “sketchy” — but they agreed to dump the items in Oakville, where he lived.

On their way there, news of the Bosma case came on the radio.

“It said a man was still missing and that Dellen Millard was a prime suspect,” Hagerman recalled. He panicked, and they pulled off the road.

They ended up ditching the box and the backpack in a stairwell behind a Shoppers Medi-Centre. Hagerman “assumed” Smich was going pick them up, but said he didn't care.

“This got thrown in my lap a couple days ago and I just wanted to get rid of it,” he said.

At least initially, he told none of this to police.

He was scared, he said. He wanted to protect himself and his family — and he had convinced himself that the drugs he believed were in there had nothing to do with the Bosma case.

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Smich's lawyer Thomas Dungey suggested during his cross-examination that Hagerman knew full well what was in the toolbox and that his claim of ignorance was “nonsense” — he was playing dumb to avoid being charged.

“It never crossed your innocent little mind?” Dungey asked him.

Hagerman insisted it had not and that an ominous joke he'd made in a text message to Millard (“haha full of guns?” it read), shortly before the early-morning hand-off, was a joke.

“I never thought in my wildest dreams that Dellen Millard would own a gun. I would never have expected him to pass it on to me of all people. We were barely in contact,” he said.

Dungey suggested Millard went to him because they had committed crimes together in the past — referencing the “missions” the jury has heard the group of friends went on, including an elaborate heist to steal a Bobcat from a construction site in 2012.

Hagerman agreed he had “made mistakes in the past.”

Dungey suggested these past crimes were also why Hagerman lied to police, that Hagerman was thinking about himself and didn't care about the Bosma family.

Hagerman said that wasn't true. He claims he called Crime Stoppers to tip them off that Smich was the other suspect they were looking for.

Dungey suggested that too could be a lie.

Hagerman replied that he was in court to tell the truth.

“Like you told police?” Dungey shot back.

As Hagerman choked back a sob on the stand, Dungey told him to stop snivelling.

“I'm nervous right now,” Hagerman replied.

“You're snivelling for yourself and not for Mr. Bosma, aren't you?” Dungey sneered, before the judge told him to “lower the tenor.”

“You can sit here now Mr. Hagerman and snivel, but it wasn't like you lied once or twice,” Dungey said. “You lied about 40 times to the police on this.”

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