Thursday saw the jury back in the courtroom for the third day of the trial of 21-year-old William Ronald Jordan.
Jordan is charged with manslaughter after a punch he threw on July 13, 2018, sent 54-year-old Anthony Dwyer to the ground, inflicting a head injury.
Dwyer died in hospital three days later.
On the third day of the trial, the jury heard from three people who were seated at a table on the Saint John Ale House patio.
Two of them were Laurel Webster and Tanya Allen, nurses who attended to Dwyer when they heard his head hit the ground.
Webster told the court that they were seated with three other witnesses when “somebody mentioned there was a commotion going on.”
She says she saw an older man push a younger. The younger man then punched the older, she said, who fell backwards.
Allen told the court she noticed the older man was swaying, she assumes from intoxication, before he pushed the younger.
She said she didn’t think a sober person would’ve been knocked down by the punch she saw.
Others have testified he looked knocked out once the punch landed.
Both nurses recount getting up to attend to Dwyer, who they say was bleeding from the nose and mouth, struggling to breathe.
Webster told the court he was making a snoring sound.
After a mid-morning break, three agreed statements of fact were read into the record, signed off on by both the Crown and the defence.
The first states that it isn’t known how much alcohol and/or cannabis Anthony Dwyer consumed that night and that he was on a prescription known to thin blood.
It stated that blood was drawn from him when he arrived at the hospital, but that blood was never submitted for toxicology analysis and no one noticed until months later — when it was too late.
The second statement details records kept by a neurosurgeon at the hospital.
The doctor recorded that Dwyer was not responsive to any stimuli and his pupils were not reactive. He says Dwyer was brain dead.
After no improvement was noted over the coming days, the decision to withdraw life support was made based on the observation that there was no hope of survival.
The third statement of fact detailed that Dwyer’s injuries were consistent with a blow to the back of the head, not the initial punch.
After those statements were entered into the record, the Crown submitted evidence in the form of a statement a server on the boardwalk gave to Saint John Police on the evening of July 13, 2018.
The server said she had served Dwyer three rum and cokes and that he had partaken in a round of shots.
The Crown is expected to call its last witness Friday morning — a forensic pathologist.
The case could be in the jury’s hands as early as next week.
Comments