Mountie shot while pinned in cruiser: Crown

Laurie Ann Bell urged her boyfriend Robert Sand to kill an RCMP officer trapped inside his damaged cruiser after chasing him down, a Crown attorney told the jury during his opening statement.

Sand, 24, and Bell, 21, both from Alberta, are accused of gunning down Const. Dennis Strongquill in December 2001. Their first-degree murder trial, being held in Brandon, Man., began Monday and is expected to last 10 weeks.

"You're going to hear and see some very disturbing things as we go along," Crown attorney Bob Morrison warned jurors. "You're going to find the nature of the killing very distasteful."

Morrison said Sand and Bell, who fell in love in the weeks leading up to the murder, were trying to escape to a new life on the east coast.

A 20-year veteran of the police force, Strongquill was killed after a routine traffic stop outside Russell, Man.

He and his partner, Const. Brian Auger, pulled over a half-ton truck that that ran a stop sign and didn't turn down its high beams, according to Morrison. As the officers approached the vehicle they were shot at.

The Mounties ran back to their cruiser and fled, but the people in the truck chased them, the jury was told. The truck crashed into the police car outside the Rusell detachment, pinning Strongquill inside.

Bell yelled, "Kill him, kill him," and then Sand shot Strongquill four times with a sawed-off shotgun while the officer was trapped in the wreckage, Morrison said.

"Const. Strongquill was wildly twisting and thrashing about as he tried escape a fate that he could not avoid," Morrison said.

After a day-long manhunt, the accused were arrested at a motel in Wolseley, Sask., about 200 kilometres away. Another suspect, Sand's brother Danny, died in a shootout with police there.

Morrison told the court he would produce evidence found at the hotel, including weapons linked to Strongquill's killing and a diary he says belonged to Sand.

Morrison says the diary contains a warning that any police officer who got in their way would be sorry.

Earlier this year, lawyers for the accused challenged the first-degree murder charges. Defence lawyer Greg Brodsky said that automatically elevating a murder charge to first-degree simply because the victim is a police officer is unconstitutional.

The argument was rejected. A conviction for first-degree murder carries a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment with no chance of parole for 25 years.