Toronto

It was the stuff of bad TV courtroom serials, a splash of drama in spectacularly poor taste.

Defence lawyer Peter Brauti had saved it for almost the end of his questioning of Const. James Forcillo: a video re-enactment by the officer on trial for murder to show jurors what he saw right before he began firing his second volley of shots at Sammy Yatim as he lay crumpled on the floor of the empty streetcar.

Forcillo, in tie and shirt sleeves, was on the jury’s monitors pretending to be the young man he killed. He held up the prop knife and told them Yatim’s jaw was clenched, his eyes wide and in the “calm before the storm,” he’d paused as if he’d decided to attack.

“At that point, he flicks the knife at me,” Forcillo explained. He ordered Yatim not to move in a “last ditch” effort to avoid shooting him.

But to no avail. He then did a bizarre pantomime of the 18-year-old falling to the floor after he’d shot him three times.

Why did the officer pause and then fire six more shots? On the video re-enactment, Forcillo picked up the knife again, rolled from his side to his back and raised himself, imitating what he said was Yatim’s apparent intention to attack him. “To my recollection, the way I perceived it at the time, it looked like Mr. Yatim was coming up at 45-degree angle but in watching the videos” he conceded, “it’s clear he doesn’t come up nearly that far.”

In fact, though Forcillo didn’t know it at the time, Yatim couldn’t get up at all. He was paralyzed from the waist down and dying.

Knowing what he knows now, his lawyer asked, what would he have done differently? “I’d never take the second volley.”

But he stood by everything else. Forcillo shot down every option suggested by those the defence has dismissed as Monday morning quarterbacks questioning why he opened fire.

Pepper spray? It wouldn’t have been effective.

Baton? If he was near enough to use his asp, he was close enough to be stabbed.

Taser? He’d asked for one but things escalated before the sergeant could get there.

Flip the switch outside the streetcar and close the doors on him? “Terrible idea” — he didn’t know if there were still passengers hiding aboard and he might just have made matters worse by creating a hostage situation.

And what about trying to de-escalate the situation by starting a conversation? Forcillo mocked the notion. If Yatim hadn’t complied with a police officer’s repeated demands to drop the knife with a gun trained on him, why would he suddenly listen if he offered him a glass of water?

To Forcillo, Yatim looked like that “guy at the bar itching for a fist fight” who showed no signs of backing down even as looked into the barrel of a Glock. “He was completely, completely unafraid,” he recalled. “Mr. Yatim was in it to fight till the end.”

In his apparently well-scripted testimony, he even threw out the controversial theory first advanced by his lawyer — that the fit young man might be suffering “excited delirium” that could give him almost superhuman strength if he decided to attack. And it appeared to Forcillo that Yatim had made that decision.

“It became clear to me,” he recalled. “He’s coming.”

Convinced his life was in danger, just 50 seconds into their standoff, Forcillo pulled the trigger. And he stands by that call. “Mr. Brauti, I’ve thought about this incident thousands of times. I live with it every day. The only conclusion that I can come to — and I’ve thought about this from every angle — the only conclusion is that he was coming off that streetcar.”

Contrary to his image as trigger-happy, Forcillo said that in his 3.5 years on the job, he’d drawn his firearm a dozen times before but never fired a bullet. To reinforce that, Brauti played cellphone footage of Forcillo’s single-handed gunpoint arrest of two men armed with knives in Kensington Market. That incident ended with the suspects on the ground, no injuries and a commendation.

So why the difference?

“They did exactly what they were told to do.”

Forcillo is set to be cross-examined Friday.

michele.mandel@sunmedia.ca

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