Closing arguments set to begin in Shafia trial
Tooba Mohammad Yahya and husband Mohammad Shafia and their son Hamed Mohammed Shafia are escorted by police officers into the Frontenac County courthouse in Kingston, Ontario on Wednesday, January 18, 2012. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick
The final submissions from the three defence lawyers for the Shafia family and the Crown are expected to take two days, then the judge will spend one day giving the jury final instructions.
Mohammad Shafia, 58, his wife Tooba Yahya, 42, and their son Hamed, 21, have each pleaded not guilty to four counts of first-degree murder.
They're accused of killing Shafia sisters Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17, and Geeti, 13, as well as Shafia's first wife in a polygamous marriage, Rona Amir Mohammad, 52.
Their bodies were found June 30, 2009, in a car submerged in a canal in Kingston, where the family had stopped on their way home to Montreal from a trip to Niagara Falls.
The jury heard from 58 witnesses and saw 162 exhibits over about 10 weeks.
Some of the most dramatic testimony has come in recent weeks as the defence lawyers called both Shafia, Yahya and a surviving son of the family, who can't be identified, to the stand.
The family members refuted essentially all of the Crown evidence, with Yahya likening the Crown's theory of what happened the night in question to a bedtime story, conjured out of thin air.
Through its numerous witnesses, the Crown painted a picture of a family in turmoil, unable to control three rebellious daughters, and an ever-widening gulf between Rona Mohammad and her husband and his second wife, a gulf deliberately created by Yahya, it's alleged.
The family says the deaths were an accident, the result of Zainab, an inexperienced and unlicensed driver taking the others on a 2 a.m. joy ride. The Crown alleges it was a carefully orchestrated plot to murder the four, and that all were dead before the car was pushed into the water.
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