CALGARY — A Calgary jury will hear final arguments today in the trial of a man charged in the hit-and-run death of a gas station worker.
Joshua Cody Mitchell, 22, is on trial facing several charges, including second-degree murder.
Maryam Rashidi, 35, tried to stop a driver from leaving a Calgary Centex gas station without paying for $113 worth of fuel in June 2015.
"Unbeknownst to her, it was to be her last shift,'' prosecutor Jonathan Hak said in his opening address to the jury.
The jury heard Rashidi chased the truck across a parking lot and onto the Trans-Canada Highway where the vehicle got stuck in traffic. She banged on the passenger window to try to get the pair to pay, then stood in front of the vehicle with her hands up.
Hak said the victim was trying to right a wrong and climbed up onto the hood. Rashidi was run over by the truck after it swerved and she fell off the hood.
Braydon Brown, who was a passenger in the stolen truck, testified he still has nightmares after seeing "the look of fear in her eyes as soon as he put it in drive."
In an interview with police played in court, Mitchell said he tried to shake Rashidi off the vehicle but it didn't work.
"I braked a bit. She fell off. And then I blacked out after she grabbed back on," Mitchell told the officer saying he didn't remember running over her.
Mitchell wrote a letter to Rashidi's family expressing his remorse at the end of the interview.
"I'm really sorry this had to happen to your family," he wrote. "It shouldn't have happened. We tried to avoid injury to anyone. I feel so bad that this happened. I've never hurt anyone physically in my life. This is the first."
"I can't live with myself knowing what I've done to your family.''
Rashidi and her husband, Ahmed Mourani Shallo, emigrated from Iran in 2014. Both got engineering jobs in Calgary, but when the Alberta economy started to decline, they were laid off.
Rashidi took the job at the gas station and had only been working there for a couple of weeks.
