TORONTO

Jahmeel Spence had just walked over to the nearby convenience store for an iced tea.

But his evening stroll four years ago would cross the path of Mark Moore, an alleged serial killer keen on establishing a bad-ass rapper reputation that “shakes the streets.”

And according to the Crown’s opening statement, the innocent father of two would be the first of Moore’s four victims as he worked to build his street cred as “Presidenteh,” a cold-blooded killer.

For no known rhyme or reason, with no criminal background or connections, the 27-year-old Spence was gunned down on Sept. 10, 2010. It seemed a random act of violence at the time, not the beginning of a vicious, inexplicable string of murders that this city had never seen.

Spence’s little boy, also named Jahmeel, had just had his very first day of kindergarten that day and his mother-in-law Christine Walters had invited the family over to her Greenbrae Circuit townhome to celebrate. Together with his wife, Shivonne Clarke, and their two young children, they were going to have her chicken curry and then head home.

Kadeem Walters, 18 at the time, was the last family member to see him alive. They were together in the backyard when Spence told his brother-in-law he was heading to the store and then left through the back gate to the laneway that ran behind the townhomes.

A store surveillance camera captured his purchase. At 9:26 p.m., a text message to his wife on his way back asked if the kids were going to sleep over at their grandmother’s or were they taking them home.

And then silence.

A short time later, his mother-in-law heard “bang, bang, bang.” As a Scarborough resident, it’s sadly not surprising that she quickly recognized them as gunshots. Walters told the court she saw a large black man running by with a small handgun and quickly locked her back door. She then did inventory to make sure her family was all present and safe.

Except Spence was missing.

She remembers telling her daughter to text him and try and reach him on the phone. There was no answer. So, she and her panicked daughter went to look for him. At the laneway, she went right, Clarke went left. When she looked back and saw her daughter break into a run, Walters turned and raced after her.

Their screams tore at the night sky. “The next time anyone that loved him saw him, he was lying dead on the cold ground of the laneway with two bullets in his head,” Crown Sean Hickey told the jury.

Const. Michael Robertson, the first responder on the scene, recalled smelling the gunpowder that still lingered in the September air. The officer tried to resuscitate Spence but soon realized there was no hope. His head had a gaping wound and inside his green baseball cap was what looked like “brain matter.”

Toronto Police found 15 shell casings from 9mm-handgun around his body, a rain of bullets that had left the young dad with eight gunshot wounds, including two to his head and one to his chest.

It was an execution, the prosecutor said, and Moore boasted about it an hour later in a text to friend and fellow rapper Kevin Williams: He was “terrorizing the burroughs,” he bragged, and advised his pal to watch for the coverage that night on the news.

The notoriety was something Moore apparently craved. In a storage locker he rented, the Crown said police would later discover a Toronto Sun article about the murder in his dresser drawer.

Moore would go on to kill three more men in the next 75 days, the prosecutor alleged, using the same 9mm handgun for all four murders as well as adding a .45-caliber pistol for fourth; all were shot at point-blank range in a gratuitous hail of bullets. Murders two and three seemed out of boredom, the Crown suggested. After driving aimlessly, a witness will testify Moore then circled back on Courthney Facey and Mike James and then riddled their bodies with gunfire.

And yet the man accused of such monstrous carnage leaned forward in the prisoner’s box throughout the first day of his serial murder trial, seemingly hungry for every last word of the notorious rapper “Presidenteh” and his alleged killing spree.