The jury has finally begun deliberating at the Halifax trial of two people charged with first-degree murder in the June 2017 stabbing death of Nadia Gonzales.
Calvin Maynard Sparks, 26, of Dartmouth and Samanda Rose Ritch, 22, of Halifax are also accused of attempting to murder a man who was with Gonzales on the night of the killing at a Dartmouth apartment building.
The trial got underway Nov. 4 in Nova Scotia Supreme Court. It was scheduled for four weeks but is in its sixth week.
Justice Christa Brothers concluded her final instructions to the eight-man, four-woman jury at about 2:35 p.m. Thursday.
She sequestered jurors for the night at about 6 p.m. Deliberations will resume Friday.
The Crown closed its case last week after calling testimony from 39 people and tendering almost 60 exhibits. The defendants chose not to call any evidence.
Gonzales, 35, of Hammonds Plains, died at an apartment building at 33 Hastings Dr. on June 16, 2017. The mother of two was stabbed about 40 times and placed in a hockey bag that was discovered on a landing in a stairwell.
The Crown alleges Sparks and Ritch armed themselves with knives and attacked Gonzales and John Patterson, who were with another man named Mike, in the hallway outside apartment 16 on the fourth floor of the Hastings Drive building.
Patterson testified that they went to the apartment to deliver crack cocaine to tenant Wayne (Batman) Bruce. Patterson was stabbed six times before he got out of the building and collapsed on the front lawn of a school across the street.
Police arrested Sparks and Ritch the next morning on Federal Avenue in Halifax. Both had fresh cuts on their hands.
A knife with Sparks’ and Gonzales’ DNA on it was found in the backyard of a Hastings Drive property. A broken knife was in the hockey bag with the body and a piece of the blade was in the fourth-floor hallway.
In closing arguments this week, Crown attorney Rob Kennedy said Sparks wanted to kill Gonzales because he was jealous of her financial success as a drug dealer, believed she was an informant and couldn’t tolerate her calling him a rat.
The prosecutor said Sparks enlisted the help of Ritch, who shared details of the killing with an undercover female officer in cells at the Halifax police station on the night of June 17, 2017.
The undercover officer testified that Ritch said her ex had stabbed a girl about 30 times and put her in a duffel bag. Ritch allegedly stated that she didn’t stab the girl but helped put her in the bag and that the girl had scratched her face.
Ritch allegedly also told the officer that her ex had stabbed her in the left ring finger during the incident.
Defence lawyer Malcolm Jeffcock, who represents Sparks, told jurors the Crown’s case was based on police tunnel vision and unreliable witnesses and should leave them with reasonable doubt that the accused were responsible for the homicide.
Three men were arrested in a nearby parking lot more than two hours after the killing but were released the next morning and never charged. Jeffcock questioned why police did not request DNA samples from the men, who had no visible injuries or blood on their clothing, and whether one of them was the source of male DNA found on Gonzales’ fingernails.
Jeffcock pointed jurors to a series of text messages and said someone else knew Gonzales was going to be at the building that night and attacked her. He said Sparks and Ritch emerged from Batman’s apartment and walked into “a world of trouble from which they were in fact lucky to escape.”
Jeffcock said the hand injuries suffered by Sparks and Ritch were consistent with defensive wounds. Sparks would have been bleeding profusely from his injuries, he said, causing his DNA to be distributed “hither and yonder.”
Peter Planetta, Ritch's lawyer, said his client had no idea what was going to happen that night. Planetta said she acted as an accessory after the fact but should be found not guilty as charged.
In her instructions, Brothers urged jurors to use their common sense and life experience to assess the evidence and reach just and proper verdicts.
“We ask for nothing more, we expect nothing less,” the judge said.
“No jury will ever be in any better or different position to decide this case than you are now.”
