- April 26, 2024
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"There are so many ways to kill you. I could kill you and nobody would know," Jonathan Canales, 31, is alleged to have said to his fiancee before he shot her through the neck and dumped her in a bathtub.
Assistant State Attorney Melissa Clark quoted those words to the jury in the opening day of arguments in Canales' trial for attempted murder Oct. 16. (The 2014 shooting case did not proceed to trial until 2018 because Canales had initially been deemed incompetent to stand trial.)
Canales, in the prosecution's telling, had been threatening the victim for years, and controlling her behavior by monitoring her phone calls and social media postings and requiring the victim, who could not drive, to ask his permission to leave the house.
On Nov. 14, 2014 — the date that he shot her, according to Clark — Canales and the victim had argued. For a while, he'd locked her out of the trailer they shared in the Mondex. That evening, she fed the children, put them to bed and was in the kitchen when Canales walked in behind her and said those words: "There are so many ways to kill you. I could kill you and nobody would know." Then he shot her through the neck with a .22-gauge Mossberg rifle, picked her up, lay her in the bathtub and began running the water, and left.
As she lay in the water, she saw the lights in the house going dark. She stumbled out of the tub and went to grab her phone from where she'd left it. It wasn't there. She searched, frantic, until she found his cell phone and called 911 — Clark played the\at call for the jury Oct. 16 — and talked to the dispatcher until Canales grabbed the phone out of her hand.
And there, in Canales' words to the dispatcher, emerged the beginning of the defense's narrative: Canales told the dispatcher that the victim had shot herself in the course of a suicide attempt.
As he did so, the victim can be heard in the background, saying: "Stop lying."
As the dispatcher tried to instruct Canales to tend to the victim's wound while paramedics were on their way, the victim, Canales told the dispatcher, was repeatedly walking away from him.
At one point, she can be heard saying, "You're hurting me."
COMPETING STORIES
On the line with the 9-1-1 dispatcher, and later with deputies, Canales told a series of conflicting stories about what had happened that night.
"She shot herself in the head. … I just came home from work and she was bleeding all over the place," he first told the dispatcher. "I didn’t do anything besides come home from work ... unlock the door … she had it right up against her head."
A few minutes later, he'd say he'd been out in a shed working on an all-terrain vehicle in the garage when it happened. In another instance, he said he'd been in another room in the trailer playing pool, came into the living room, saw her with the gun against her head, and tried to grab it away from her when it went off.
When deputies arrived at the home, the victim was sitting on the front steps. Canales was a few feet behind her, half-in, half-out of the trailer. She was smeared with blood.
But Canales, sitting in his boxers, had no blood on him — certainly not what he would have had if he'd been trying to help stop her bleeding, a Flagler County Sheriff's Office commander who responded that night told the jury. Canales was stone-faced, not touching her. (Canales had initially been charged with not rendering aid, but the prosecution dropped that charge.) In the courtroom on Oct. 16, Canales was similarly expressionless throughout the hours of testimony.
By the time law enforcement arrived at the home, the victim was coughing up blood and unable to speak. The FCSO commander, Daniel Weaver, gave her a pen and paper. She wrote that she hadn't shot herself.
He asked her who had.
At that point, she didn't remember.
But, Weaver said, "With the location of the gunshot wound, it’s not a common location for an attempted suicide."
MISSING EVIDENCE
According to the victim, she was in the trailer's kitchen eating leftover fried chicken when Canales shot her. According to Canales, she was in the living room, near a bare mattress the two had been using as a bed.
Clark, presenting blood spatter evidence, showed that it indicated that the victim wouldn't have been in the living room at the time of the shooting: There wasn't enough blood there to support that story.
But there was also a problem with there defense's narrative of the case, as defense attorney Garry Wood pointed out in an extensive questioning of former FCSO crime scene investigator Laura Pazarena: The FCSO's investigators hadn't collected crucial evidence, including the white kitchen chair the victim said she'd been sitting on when she was shot.
A photo of the kitchen showed that the chair, and a nearby cooler, were smeared with what appeared to be blood. But they hadn't been collected and tested.
And the mattress in the living room wasn't taken as evidence until Dec. 2, more than two weeks after the shooting.
"This case is not about an attempted murder or an aggravated battery," Wood said in his opening statement to the jury of five men and three women. "We’re going to be asking you to find and see what is obviously reasonable doubt."
The attorneys' opening statements Oct. 16 followed a full day of jury selection Oct. 15, when Judge Terence Perkins, prosecutor Melissa Clark, and defense attorney Garry Wood asked the potential jurors questions in turn.
The prosecution asked questions to test whether potential jurors understood standards of evidence and whether they would be biased against law enforcement officers' testimony, and the defense asked questions aimed at determining if potential jurors understood the state's burden of proof or if they would be biased against the defendant. Wood also asked if any of the prospective jurors had any finds or close relatives who had killed themselves, or had tried to. A number raised their hands.
The case is expected to continue through Friday, Oct. 19.
