You hear on the news that there’s been a shooting at the Eaton Centre. There’s a pang of alarm in your heart. So you call both your siblings. One answers, the other does not.

Three years pass before you hear eyewitness testimony from a person who says she remembers the sound of a cellphone ringing on the victim who’d dropped to the floor of the mall food court, dead where he fell. That was you, calling your brother over and over and over again. But you’ll never hear his voice again.

You’re another sister of the deceased. You caught a flash, on TV, a dead person in a body bag, zipped up and wheeled from the scene. You only realize later that was your brother.

You’re the mother of a gunshot victim — he died in hospital a week after that mall terror — and you’ve hardly stepped outside your home in seven years. Most of your family and friends, you don’t want to see them anymore. Because they blame you for raising two sons who were shot to death in separate incidents and a third charged in a robbery. Violence has overwhelmed your immigrant Sri Lankan family and you are bewildered.

“Everyone will say that my son is bad but for me it is not like that,” you write.

You’re the fiancé of a man who was killed when you were three months pregnant. Your son, now 6 years old, wears his father’s student ID card around his neck, just to feel closer to the father he never knew. “I love my dad,” he tells you. “I wish I got to meet him.”

You are the father of a 13-year-old boy, a bystander, who survived being shot in the head. You begin by speaking mildly in the witness stand, ask that court staff move the monitor so that the large screen is tilted directly towards the man in the dock. You want him to see your son as he once was, adventurous, skiing and wakeboarding — before brilliant emergency doctors removed a third of your son’s skull, before the six brain-injury surgeries, before the ever-after frailty whereby even a slight fall, a modest bump to the head, might kill him.

So suddenly your raise your voice: “BANGBANGBANGBANGBANG,” like the crack of gunfire in the courtroom, and everybody is jolted. The sound, you say, of the shooter firing 14 bullets into a busy food court that night.

You’re the mother of that child and your tone grows increasingly bitter recalling how, at the second trial of the man who shot your son, you and the teenager were not permitted to testify for the Crown — that was deemed too prejudicial towards the accused and only now can your words be heard, from your own mouth. “It makes me feel that we are insignificant and unimportant and pushed aside.”

You are, were, that child but now you’re a 20-year-old college student, tall and gangly, but so many things you can’t do anymore, out of caution. Many days, your head pounds like a hammer. Your short-term memory is shot so you can’t always remember that you have a homework assignment or what it is. Without the GPS you constantly carry, you wouldn’t know where you were.

You’re angry, understandably so, because your first-hand suffering was considered too potentially impactful, outweighing its probative value. You disappeared into the disallowed background.

“I feel like I’ve been cast aside, like a bump in the road.”

You’re the pregnant woman who was trampled in the freak-out stampede. You’re the young woman who was shot in the leg, left immobile for three years — from crutches to cane — and you’ve been seized by panic in your university lecture hall, a sudden fear that the shooter will “barge in … and shoot me.”

On and on they went, Tuesday morning, everybody who had something they wanted to say — to the court, to Justice Brian O’Mara — before sentence is passed on Christopher Husbands.

You can agree or disagree that victims and next of kin, even the broader community, should not be given this platform, should not wrest the courtroom with their grief and fury as victim impact statements are submitted, often read aloud, sometimes speaking through the Crown. You can argue it doesn’t really have anything to do with justice, more melodramatic window-dressing. And certainly judges are cautioned not to be significantly influenced by these testimonials, which follow upon a verdict.

But this is a case which has been going on forever, replete with outrages and decisions that have brought the justice system into disrepute, at just about every juncture straining to vouchsafe the defendant’s legal rights. Which, in the main, is as it should be, probably. Except the marginalia has too often been turned into the main.

Toronto will remember the Eaton Centre shooting on June 2, 2012, of course, back in the days when scattershot gunfire in a crowded public place could still shock — seven years removed from a civic holiday weekend, just past, when at least 15 people were injured in shootings across the city.

Husbands was convicted in 2015 on two counts of second-degree murder, five counts of aggravated assault, one count of criminal negligence causing bodily harm and one of recklessly discharging a firearm. He got at least 30 years behind bars — an unprecedentedly harsh sentence for second-degree homicide.

The murdered: Ahmed Hassan, 24, who died on the spot, and Nixon Nirmalendran, 22. The most catastrophically wounded of the surviving gunshot victims was 13-year-old Connor Stevenson, who’d been in the food court with his mother and older sister.

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But it didn’t end there, with Husbands’ conviction and sentencing. His tireless defence appealed on procedural grounds and Ontario’s top court agreed, ruling that the trial judge had made an irreparable mistake by overruling a defence request that “rotating triers” be used during the jury selection process.

Distilled: Prospective jurors were questioned as to whether they believed they could remain impartial. Two people from the jury pool take on the role of “triers,” weighing the answer and determining whether there are signs of bias. Then the prosecution and defence decide whether to allow that person on the jury.

Each newly appointed juror replaces one of the two triers so that the responsibility is shared. It’s called rotating jurors. At the request of an accused, however, the court can appoint two people who assess all the prospective juror responses. These are called “static triers” and do not get to serve on the jury.

Husbands’ lawyers made it clear they wanted rotating triers. Superior Court Justice Eugene Ewaschuk imposed static triers. Hence the Court of Appeal overturning the verdict and ordering a new trial.

This past February, a jury — after deliberating for six days — returned a verdict of guilty on manslaughter times two and aggravated assault times five. The minimum sentence for manslaughter involving a firearm is four years. The maximum is life — which the Crown is seeking.

Manslaughter — with extensive video evidence of the shooting — suggests the jury, to some extent, bought the defence argument that Husbands was in the throes of post-traumatic stress disorder when the pulled the trigger 14 times; that he was in an “dissociative state” due the horrors he’d experienced in an earlier multiple-stabbing assault months previously. He believed that one of the men he turned his gun on that June day had been among those earlier assailants and that, at the Eaton Centre, he’d overheard one of the men tell others in his group of male friends to shoot him.

The defence argued mental illness, arguing — as they had at the first trial, that Husbands was “not criminally responsible.” The Crown agreed Husbands suffered from PTSD but maintained he knew exactly what he was doing — exacting revenge on his attackers.

Meanwhile, the prosecution will appeal the manslaughter verdict, alleging O’Mara erred by requiring the Crown to introduce evidence from three witnesses — the Stevenson family — only through an agreed statement of fact, and further erred in excluding Husbands’ criminal record.

And Husbands? At 30, he looks hardly changed from seven years ago. Still the slight, wiry, bespectacled person he was when this interminable matter first came before the courts.

Hands clasped in his lap, he didn’t look away on Tuesday from the hurting witnesses, the impacted.

Didn’t twitch a muscle either, stony-faced.

The sentencing hearing continues.

Rosie DiManno is a columnist based in Toronto covering sports and current affairs. Follow her on Twitter: @rdimanno

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