In handcuffs and shackles, Dyrrin Daley was escorted back to an Allandale duplex where two men were left to die four years ago.
Nearing the end of his month-long trial on charges of first- and second-degree murder, Daley, along with the judge, Crown attorneys and defence lawyer toured the second-storey apartment where Nickolas Pasowisty, 19, and James Pasowisty, 51 were killed on Feb. 8, 2017.
Going in as separate groups, the entire visit inside the home, which was videotaped, took seven minutes.
Less than two hours later they had all returned to courtroom 15 in the Barrie courthouse to view the video in which there was no talking.
Daley has maintained he went to the home in the middle of the night that February four years - as he had before - to buy marijuana, figuring the younger Pasowisty was still awake. Inside there was an argument about money and Daley said the two men attacked him.
Daley testified that he pulled a pocket knife out of his pocket, having only enough time to extract one of the two blades, initially intending to scare off the men but then striking out when he feared they would toss him off the balcony.
The father and son were found dead a short while later after police received two silent 911 calls from inside the second-floor duplex. The father had been stabbed 38 times and the son 35 times.
But the Crown accuses Daley of being the aggressor, acting out in anger at the older Pasowisty, and that it was not self defence that prompted him to repeatedly stab the two unarmed men. Instead, the prosecutors assert, Daley intended to kill the two men, forcibly confining the teenager.
While the defence lawyer called only his client as a witness, he also asked that the testimony of the then-owner of the house given at the preliminary inquiry in 2018 be admitted as evidence.
According to a transcript of that hearing, Harold Green said he had woken up at about 3 a.m. to go to the washroom and heard noise.
Green, who had lived in that house for 75 years, had been renting the upper apartment to the older Pasowisty for three or four years and often saw visitors.
That morning, he said he heard people in the stairs going up to the apartment and then some talking upstairs. He heard no knocking and no doorbell.
Because he wears a hearing aid, which he didn’t have on at the time, he couldn’t make out the conversation, but a short time later he heard “emotion” and what he thought was a woman in distress.
“It wasn’t really crying, but just a - some - some grief. If you know what that means,” he told the court at the inquiry on July 16, 2018.
He testified that it wasn’t that common to hear people in the middle of the night and he was surprised because they usually kept the door locked and he figured the visitors had just come right in.
Police, he testified, were there within a half hour.
The trial resumes Wednesday when the defence will make its closing statements followed by the Crown on Thursday.
Justice Vanessa Christie earlier indicated she will not immediately render a verdict.
