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HAMILTON, Ont. — Peter Khill says he wasn’t just defending his old pickup truck when he shot and killed Jon Styres on a cold February morning two years ago, rather he was facing an unknown but imminent threat outside his house that he “needed to neutralize.”

But to that, prosecutor Steve O’Brien snapped at the former army reservist Tuesday in the climax of a tough and pointed cross-examination, “There was a guy stealing your truck and you killed him. He was not ‘a threat you needed to neutralize,’ but a human being.”

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Just seconds before, O’Brien told Khill, “It could have been some goofy teenage kid from your neighbourhood” trying to steal his truck that morning.

“It was not some armed Taliban insurgent,” O’Brien sneered.

“That (the possibility of the intruder being an innocent teen) wasn’t worth a moment’s pause to call 911?’

Styres wasn’t a teenager, but the 29-year-old from the nearby Six Nations reserve was unarmed when he received two lethal shotgun blasts, one to the chest and another to the back of his arm, which also ended up in his chest. It was about 3 a.m. on Feb. 4, 2016.