When there’s a gun in your face, you do as you’re told, a witness testified in a trial in Red Deer on Monday.
David Kertesz, 28, is being tried for 16 offences, including kidnapping, unlawful confinement, extortion and armed robbery.
Christopher Arthur Scott Dyck, 38, testified in Court of Queen’s Bench that he and a couple of friends were at home in their Red Deer apartment, smoking crack cocaine late in the evening of May 14, 2013, when a “scraggly, blond-haired kid” asked to be let in.
Questioned by Crown prosecutor Wayne Silliker, Dyck said he recognized the man from a previous drug connection, so he opened the security doors to let him into the Parke Avenue building.
Two men who had been hiding outside the door came in with him, one of them armed with what Dyck described as a bolt-action .22-calibre rifle with the barrel sawed off.
Dyck said he took them to the basement suite, where they sat him down, produced a second firearm and ordered him to hand over his drugs and money. When he and his friends couldn’t produce much of either, they ordered him to connect them with his dealer.
Dyck said he set up a buy in the parking lot and was then taken outside, while the “scraggly kid” was left in the apartment with the rifle to watch over the other two occupants.
Once outside, Dyck was told to get into a waiting pickup truck occupied by two women.
The taller of the two men got into the driver’s seat while the shorter man, armed with a pistol, took a seat in the back.
Dyck testified that they drove to a nearby fast-food restaurant, dropped the women off and drove back to the neighbouring building just as his dealer’s car arrived for the buy.
Dyck said he crawled through the truck window and ran away after his two captors went to speak with the dealer, tripping and falling a couple of times, but not looking back.
He jumped into the passenger side of a cab that had stopped outside the fast-food restaurant and used the driver’s phone to call 911.
He told the court that he quit smoking crack about a week later.
“You get an incident like that, a gun pointed at your face, you tend to realize what’s more important — your drugs or your life.”
Three men were arrested later and charged with various offences in connection with the incident.
Kertesz’s trial is expected to last for the rest of the week.
Jordon Pritchard, 27, pleaded guilty in Red Deer provincial court on Feb. 14 to a single count of break and enter with intent to aid and abet an indictable offence.
Pritchard is scheduled for sentencing on April 9.
Still awaiting trial is Garnet Colby Mcinnes, 23.
bkossowan@www.reddeeradvocate.com