Two men involved in a downtown Victoria bar fight that turned deadly refused to tell staff what they were fighting about, a B.C. Supreme Court trial heard Monday.
Staff from Lucky Bar took the stand Monday in the second-degree murder trial of Mohamed Daud Omar, 29.
Omar, who is representing himself in the trial, is accused of fatally stabbing 30-year-old John Dickinson on March 1, 2022, after an altercation in the bar.
Caleb Parshyn, the bar’s head of security, testified he saw Dickinson having a heated conversation with a man but couldn’t make out the words. He identified Omar as the other man in the conversation.
Parshyn told the jury he watched Dickinson try to walk Omar out of the bar, his arm around Omar. Both looked “quite upset,” he said.
“They were dipping their heads and stuff, like there was going to be an altercation,” Parshyn testified.
Parshyn said he walked over to the men and asked what was going on, but neither would give him an answer.
Dickinson told Parshyn that he needed to remove the man from the bar, he said. Parshyn said he walked Omar out of the bar and tried again outside to find out what was happening.
Omar “believed I had no interest in hearing his side of the story and that I was just looking to kick him out,” he said.
A short time later, Parshyn saw Dickinson and his girlfriend looking for their jackets.
Dickinson also would not tell Parshyn what the two were fighting about and said he wanted to leave so that he wouldn’t be banned, Parshyn testified.
He said he walked behind Dickinson and his girlfriend as they left the bar. Dickinson yelled out and pushed his girlfriend to the side, then rushed over to Omar, he said.
Parshyn was directly behind Dickinson and tried to grab him around his shoulders as he ran to Omar, he said. He managed to get a hold of him only after Dickinson connected with Omar, and he couldn’t pull the two apart, he testified.
The two men latched onto each other, Parshyn said, and he couldn’t tell who was holding onto whom. They were swearing and yelling at each other. They tripped and Parshyn helped slow their fall to the ground, he said. Dickinson ended up on top of Omar.
Parshyn testified he held onto Omar while another security staff, Rupert Cameron, lifted Dickinson up.
“Then I saw John [Dickinson] drop from the corner of my eye. He let out a grunt,” Parshyn said.
He looked over and saw Dickinson had a wound in his abdomen and his intestines were outside of his body.
“As I’m taken aback by what I see, the other gentleman breaks my grip on him and takes off running,” he said.
Only about 15 seconds passed between the men falling and Cameron lifting Dickinson back up, Parshyn said. He never saw a knife during the fight, he testified.
Parshyn put one hand on Dickinson’s stomach wound while calling 911 with the other, he said.
Dickinson died that morning in hospital.
The court has previously heard a recording of a 911 call from about half an hour after the incident in which the caller identifies himself as Mohamed Omar and says he stabbed someone in an altercation outside a bar downtown in an act of self-defence.
The caller gave his location to the police call taker and officers arrested Omar at the residence.
The trial is scheduled to wrap at the end of June.
