Justin Bone says he remembers waking up at a police station after days of roaming the streets, taking drugs and trying to find a place to stay.
The 40-year-old Edmonton man, who is on trial for second-degree murder, testified that detectives began questioning him and told him he was under arrest for two assaults.
The next thing he knew, he said, police told him the two injured men had died and he was facing murder charges.
Bone is accused of beating Hung Trang and Ban Phuc Hoang to death in separate, unprovoked attacks while they were working at businesses in Edmonton’s Chinatown on May 18, 2022.
Bone has pleaded not guilty.
“Don’t remember being arrested,” Bone testified Wednesday in Edmonton Court of King’s Bench. “I don’t remember anything that happened downtown.”
Bone said that in the days leading up to the deaths, he went without sleep and roamed the streets trying to find a place to stay while mostly consuming methamphetamines.
“I remember waking up, being thirsty, popping the sprinkler,” he said about waking up in a police cell.
The only other thing he recalls from that day, he said, is sitting on a roof of a warehouse near downtown in the morning and running away when a metal grate fell.
Bone arrived in Edmonton three days earlier, after he was brought to the city by RCMP officers.
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He had been released from jail in late April that year on unrelated charges under conditions that he stay away from Edmonton and live at a family friend’s home in Alberta Beach, about 70 kilometres from the city.
The family friend was the partner of Bone’s late uncle.
Bone told court that he took part in a sexual relationship with the man in exchange for money.
“He was wanting sexual favours, and I felt obliged to give it to him because I had nowhere else to go,” Bone said.
Court heard that an argument between Bone and the man escalated at the Alberta Beach home.
Bone testified that he ended their sexual relationship and it upset the man. The dispute intensified when the man refused to buy him cannabis, Bone said.
The man called RCMP and reported that Bone had threatened him, and the officers brought Bone to Edmonton, even though it would breach his release conditions.
Bone testified that he asked to be dropped off in the city’s west end to stay with an aunt. He said he wanted to avoid the Hope Mission shelter downtown, which he described as dirty and unsafe.
The aunt wasn’t home, he said, and he stayed a night with his drug dealer, who gave him two to three grams of methamphetamine.
Bone testified that he tried calling the city’s crisis line, but its suggestion was to stay at Hope Mission. He said he also called his probation officer, who told him the only thing she could do was try to fast-track his application to stay at a rehabilitation centre.
He spent the next two days roaming the streets and consuming drugs, he said.
The day before the killings, Bone said he remembers getting kicked out of a detox centre across the street from the Royal Alexandra Hospital near the downtown, but he doesn’t know why.
He said he went across the street, laid back and saw what he described as a dragon or face in the sky.
“My fingertips got extremely cold and for some reason, I don’t know, I remember sitting up and seeing a magpie bird beside me eating a taquito,” he said.
“For some reason I was talking to it, saying, ‘Are you giving me an offering or something?’ And I took a bite out of it.”
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