‘Somebody was stabbed and he's dead': Unheard testimony and video footage from the girl swarm case

Toronto Star

3 days ago

'I put my arm up, the knife went in.'
Everyone had waited for this, to hear what the 16-year-old boy would say on the witness stand.
This wasn't the trial for the girl accused of stabbing and killing Kenneth Lee, but instead the preliminary hearing, a kind of dress rehearsal involving all eight of the girls and their lawyers a year earlier. This is where legal issues — including whether the girls should stand trial — got ironed out.
The boy had never agreed to speak to police. So, his testimony, seven days into the hearing, was a discovery of what he knew and what he would say at trial.
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He would never be called to testify at the Superior Court of Justice at the only trial that would go ahead — not once the Crown prosecutors and defence lawyers learned what he had to say. The girls had been drinking and smoking weed that night and were not acting like themselves, he said, which could have hurt the Crown's case that the girl intentionally harmed Lee.
And, the boy said — unhelpfully for her defence — the girl who was accused of stabbing Lee, had a knife that injured him during a play fight, after the swarming attack.
'Your daughter's been arrested for murder': How a mother learned about her teen's role in Kenneth Lee's killing
That testimony has, until now, been under a publication ban.
On Friday, Justice Philip Campbell found the girl prosecutors tried to pin Lee's stabbing on not-guilty of murder, saying there was reasonable doubt she fatally wounded him.
The decision brings to a close the prosecution against eight teen girls, ages 13 to 16 at the time, who were part of the swarming attack.
But with none of them guilty of murder, the question remains: Who stabbed Kenneth Lee?
This story details never before publicized evidence — how the girls themselves initially blamed one amongst them for the stabbing; how one of their friends testified that he himself was accidentally stabbed; and how a police interview unfolded with the accused stabber, one that was never admitted at trial.
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None of the young people can be named under the Youth Criminal Justice Act.
Kenneth Lee was visiting the parkette with a friend when their paths crossed with the girls, who swarmed him and at least one of whom stabbed him.
Toronto Police Service
In May 2024, the teen boy, under oath, said he'd known the girls he was hanging out with that night for a couple of months. He identified himself in video surveillance footage with them throughout the night of Dec. 17 and early morning hours of Dec. 18, 2022, following Lee's death.
First, he was captured on the Yorkdale station subway platform where he and several girls could be seen chasing each other, playfully, up and down the tunnel. He was asked to identify what two of the girls could be seen holding: 'A knife,' he said.
The court heard earlier this month, when one of the girls pleaded guilty to manslaughter, that she threw that knife onto the subway tracks 'because she didn't want anything dangerous to happen.' That fact was entered as part of an agreed statement that the Crown said they could neither prove nor disprove.
Following the attack on Lee, video footage shown at the preliminary hearing showed the group of teens continued to loiter downtown, in an office lobby on Bay Street and outside, taking videos of themselves laughing and dancing. The girl accused of stabbing Lee, in one video, mimics stomping motions towards the cellphone camera, with what looks to be red blood stains visible on her grey sweatpants.
Video surveillance footage of the attack on Lee shows the girl jumping with both feet and appearing to stomp on Lee as he is backed into a concrete planter in the parkette.
Just over an hour after the attack on Lee, shortly after 1 a.m., the teens returned to Union Station where some of them began play fighting outside, the boy recounted when asked to review surveillance footage of the moment in court. It was hard to see exactly what happens from the video angle, but at one point the boy can be seen in the video bent over as the girls gather around him.
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A plan drawing of the parkette where Kenneth Lee was fatally stabbed and the surrounding area that was entered as an exhibit in court.
Court exhibit
The boy told the court that he was accidentally stabbed by the girl who would later be on trial for stabbing Lee — 'Wrong movements at the wrong time,' he told the court.
A knife sliced through his right forearm, he said. The girls helped him get inside the station, video shows, where they got the attention of security guards. One of the girls called 911, the lead police detective in the case testified at the preliminary hearing, and said their friend had been stabbed.
The girls would follow their friend to SickKids Hospital, where he was treated. The boy snapped a picture of his bloodied wrist, appearing stitched up, and sent it to his friends — later seized as evidence from the girls' cellphones.
The messages were 'going crazy' in the group chat about how the boy had been injured, one of the girls' friends, who was not involved in the swarming, later testified at trial.
The boy agreed, when asked by the girl's defence lawyer during cross-examination at the preliminary hearing, that the girl who stabbed him seemed drunk and was acting out of character that night.
He was asked if it was possible he was cut with scissors and not a knife. The girl accused of stabbing Lee's had two pairs of nail scissors on her when she was arrested. None of the girls had a knife.
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The boy testified he had also been smoking weed and drinking that night, affecting his memory.
'Maybe,' he answered.
The girl accused of fatally stabbing Kenneth Lee was arrested with two small pairs of nail scissors.
Court exhibit
All eight girls were corralled in the lobby of SickKids Hospital when officers began to arrive through the revolving doors to investigate them.
It was almost 3 a.m. and at first the officers didn't tell the girls they were being detained as they watched them from a distance, their body-worn cameras turned on.
The girls didn't seem immediately bothered by the cops' presence. They didn't realize yet what was happening as they continued talking to each other and using their phones.
The body-worn footage was played as part of a hearing about the admissibility of evidence at trial, but not at the trial itself.
It wasn't until one of the girls asked an officer if she could talk to someone in the hospital lobby when the girls began to realize something was wrong.
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'None of you are going to be leaving anytime soon,' the officer said.
'We can't leave?' one of them asked.
There is an ongoing investigation about an incident at York and University, an officer replied.
'Somebody was stabbed and he's dead.'
Crime scene photos show where Toronto Police marked blood from Kenneth Lee in the parkette where he was fatally stabbed.
Court exhibit
'He's not dead,' one of the girls responded, possibly referring to their injured friend, as several of the girls approached where the officers had gathered.
The girls denied being at York University — 'That was not us' — misunderstanding that the cop was referring to the downtown intersection, near Union Station.
'None of you are leaving until we sort things out,' an officer said.
Is it a 'boy' or a 'girl' who's dead? one asked.
It's a male adult, an officer told them.
As they debated the location the officer described, one of the older girls clued in: 'I didn't kill nobody.'
'Yo, it was f—ing this b—h right here,' another said, gesturing to one of the girls seated behind her.
The girls were talking over each other.
'Nobody killed nobody are you crazy?' a girl fired back at the girl who levelled the accusation.
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How do you know her? an officer asked. Another girl chimed in to say she heard from another girl that the girl behind them did it.
Officers then moved toward that girl. 'You're being arrested for homicide,' one said, as she was handcuffed. The girl the Crown would eventually accuse of stabbing Lee was seated next to her, jacket hood up over her face. She was not speaking.
In his decision, the judge found he could not exclude the possibility that the girl being accused in the SickKids lobby was responsible for the fatal stab wound. That girl, he wrote, can be seen on video with 'something that is shiny and shaped like a blade' protruding from her hand as she runs towards Lee during the final wave of the attack. At the same time, he wrote he could not conclude she was holding a knife.
'Is it a Chinese man?' one of the girls asked, still confused about why they were being investigated.
'It's a very serious matter,' one of the officers said.
Officers searched the pockets of the girl being arrested, finding them full of candy and gum.
'I'm gonna read you your rights in the car, OK?'
She was the first to be arrested.
The 14-year-old is brought into a small, windowless interview room wearing an orange police-issued jumpsuit, her pink hoodie visible underneath.
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The police detective followed behind her and sat across from her at a small white table that looked bolted to the floor.
There's no lawyer, no parent present — the reason why this video footage, also discussed at the hearing about evidence admissibility, is never entered at her trial.
'My job here is to find out exactly what happened,' the officer told the girl, saying some of the other girls were choosing to tell police exactly what they did to Lee.
'Do I have to answer?' the girl asked. He told her she didn't.
Gta
A secret confession, chartered flights and strip searches: Behind the scenes of the girls-swarming saga after the killing of Kenneth Lee
Here are some of the details that can now be reported for the first time.
He led her through questions of where she was that night. She complained of losing her voice from talking too much. He asked why she wasn't making eye contact.
'I can't look at people when I talk to them . . . It makes me uncomfortable,' she said.
Eventually the detective turned his laptop around to play the surveillance video from the parkette for her.
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The girl leaned forward, tucking her chin into her hoodie as she watched. She pointed herself out in the video.
'Do you want to just tell me what happened?' the detective asked.
'I want to see what happened,' she responded. She couldn't remember, she said, telling the officer she hadn't been sober.
'I remember, but just don't remember,' she said.
The detective continued playing the video from the parkette.
'He dies after this, from what happened to him,' the detective said.
'He suffered stab wounds . . . Did you stab him?'
There is a long silence. She doesn't answer.