Nathaniel Veltman found guilty of 1st-degree murder in historic London, Ont., attack trial
A jury in Windsor, Ont., has reached a decision in the landmark trial of Nathaniel Veltman, accused of deliberately running over a Muslim family in London, in what the Crown had argued was an act of terrorism.
After less than six hours of deliberation, jurors returned to a packed courtroom Thursday afternoon to deliver their verdict: guilty on four counts of first-degree murder and one count of attempted murder.
Family and friends of the victims were in tears, hugging each other even before the verdict was read. As it was read out, gasps, quiet sobbing and sniffling could be heard in the courtroom, with some members of the jury even wiping away tears.
“This verdict represents to us, some solace for the crimes that were committed on that fateful day, June 6, 2021, which will forever be imprinted in our memory,” a statement released on behalf of the victims’ family reads (included in full below).
“We have not been grieving alone. We are not healing alone. We pray that we can move forward to build a decent and just society.”
The defence and Crown agreed that Veltman, 22, drove his truck into the Afzaal family on June 6, 2021 – killing four members of the family and orphaning a fifth – automatically meeting the legal threshold for manslaughter.
However, the defence tried to argue that there was a lack of evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt the Crown’s argument that Veltman intended for them to die and that he had been planning to kill as well as the Crown’s claim that the deaths occurred during the commission of a terrorist act, which automatically meets the threshold for first-degree murder regardless of intent to kill.
The jury’s decision does not reveal which path jurors took to reach their conclusions, only that
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