The woman who was with Brandon Neil Prevey when he was gunned down outside a house party in Red Deer testified on Tuesday afternoon against a man accused of arranging his murder.
Prevey, 29 was shot dead at about 3 a.m. on April 5, 2009, just after he and Shelley Neville pulled up to the front of 11 Ibbotson Close, where they had planned to attend a house party.
Christopher Martin Fleig, 28, is charged with conspiracy to commit murder and first-degree murder in relation to his alleged connection with the shooting.
In her testimony before Justice Kirk Sisson in Red Deer Court of Queen’s Bench, Neville said she and Prevey had been friends for about three years and decided to attend the party after meeting up at a bar downtown.
Prevey parked his Jeep Cherokee in front of the house and Neville was getting out on the passenger side when she dropped her purse and bent down to pick it up. “I heard a loud noise and then the glass in front of my face exploded,” she said under questioning by Crown prosecutor Jason Snider.
When the noise stopped, she looked up to see a black, two-door car speeding away and then went around to the driver’s side of the Jeep to check on Prevey, known to her by his nickname, Commando.
“I said, ‘Did you get hit?’ He said, ‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘Are you going to be OK?’ He said, ‘I don’t think so.’ ”
Neville said she ran inside the house to tell people what had happened and to get help, and then phoned 911.
Prevey was dead when she got back to the car.
Neville testified that she met both the victim and the accused in 2006 and dated Fleig for about a year and a half.
Her friendship with Prevey continued after the split but the two men had a parting of the ways at some point. She said she knew there was an issue but didn’t know what it was.
Neville verified that Fleig was the previous owner of the Jeep. However, she could not confirm whether anyone else had driven the vehicle after Prevey acquired it, including his roommate, whom Snider contends was the actual target of the killing.
She said the roommate owned a BMW but something went wrong with it and he was left without a vehicle of his own.
Under cross examination by Fleig’s lawyer, Allan Fay, Neville admitted that she could not see how many people were in the car she saw fleeing from the scene and assumed rather than saw that the shots were fired by a passenger.
She said that Prevey and Fleig had gang connections, that the owner of the house hosting the party was a biker involved in organized crime and that he and others attending the party were involved in organized crime, including trafficking drugs.
Const. Joshua Matthies, who was the first police officer to arrive at the scene, testified earlier in the day that there were a number of people with known gang connections at the party, including two people associated with the Nomads, a local branch of the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club.
Matthies was a general duty police officer at the time and his since transferred to the organized crime unit of the Red Deer RCMP general investigations section.
bkossowan@www.reddeeradvocate.com