Four women add their memories from the night Misha Pavelick died

Warning: This story includes crude language that may offend some readers.

Four witnesses on Monday — one after the other — filled in different parts of the same story in the trial for the man accused of killing Misha Pavelick.

Misha was fatally stabbed during a grad party on the May long weekend in 2006. The man accused was under 18 at the time, so he cannot be publicly named. Witnesses in the trial who were under 18 at the time are also not being named.

Read more:

• Uninvited guests, a grad party, an ex-girlfriend: Crown lawyer lays out case in Misha Pavelick trial
• ‘Screaming and running’: witnesses who were at the party testify at Misha Pavelick murder trial
• Very pale: A last memory of Misha Pavelick at the trial for his murder

Kayleen Zander, Kayla Kemp and two young people — F.L. and P.D. — were all out at the party that weekend.

Zander, Kemp and F.L. were with the group that went out to the party on that Sunday night, which included the accused. P.D. had been at the campground all weekend.

Kemp said she saw two folding knives on the dashboard of the accused’s car before they all went out to Kinookimaw Campground. Dustin Scudder had previously testified that they’d been showing them off.

After they got to the campground, but before anything happened with Misha, Zander, F.L. and Kemp said a good portion of their group went and found another girl, P.D., who Kemp had a problem with.

Kemp said they went around to P.D.’s campsite, where she was sleeping in a tent, and there was a fight.

P.D. got emotional on the stand when she explained she woke up to find her tent surrounded by six or seven girls. She said she was pulled out by her arm and beaten up, though Kemp’s memory was that most of it happened inside the tent.

Zander said she didn’t see a knife, but does remember one of the guys in the group saying he had a knife with him and could cut the tent open. Kemp remembered a similar comment and identified the accused as the one who said it.

Neither F.L. nor P.D. remembered anyone talking about a knife at that point.

P.D. did remember the accused telling her, after the fight was over, “that’s what you get.” She said she left the campground with her boyfriend immediately after.

Later, Zander said B.V., who was also with their group and was Misha’s ex, came to them and said there was going to be trouble between Misha and her new boyfriend, W.L. In her testimony, F.L. remembered this happening before the fight with P.D.

Zander said she went with B.V. to try to talk Misha out of starting anything. She remembered Misha was sitting on the tailgate of a truck and they told him they weren’t at the party looking for a problem, but Misha told them “it” was going to happen.

Kemp and Zander explained how the fight started in a similar fashion – that Misha and W.L. were arguing, Misha hit W.L. with a glass bottle and then the grappling started.

According to F.L., after that Misha started to walk away but B.V., his ex, followed him, slapping him in the head and face, and F.L. said the accused, and three other boys followed them.

That was the last F.L. said she saw of Misha because they went around the other side of the fire, and her attention was drawn by the other fight when a second bottle was either thrown or wielded, hitting Scott Nelson and W.L.

Kemp told court she remembered seeing Misha on the ground in the fight, then he was on his feet, talking to someone and walking away with B.V. Then, she said the other fight between Nelson and Enns started.

Kemp didn’t know where the accused was at that point, but said when she was running back to the parking lot, she saw the accused and Craig Pratt pop out of the trees halfway up the path.

Zander and Kemp said the accused’s vehicle was gone from the campground parking lot by the time they got there.

While they were waiting for others, Zander said some people came out, told them someone had been stabbed, and they made W.L. turn out his pockets — she said there was no knife.

F.L. remembered following Scott back to the cars and seeing the accused and two others come out of the bushes. She said her hand got sticky after the accused handed her a beer and she later found there was blood on her.

Misha Pavelick (provided)

The group stopped at Regina Beach after leaving the campground, and Kemp said she heard it first there that Misha had been stabbed, when the accused made reference to it. But she said she was confused because she’d seen him up and walking.

Kemp and F.L. were in the car with the accused and others on the way back to Regina. Kemp was driving and remembered the accused screaming at her to pull over, and then he and Craig Pratt got out of the car and started running. She said the two were arguing with each other but were silent by the time they got back.

In her recollections to court, F.L. said Pratt and the accused were arguing after they got back — the accused had turned around in the front seat and kept asking “Who killed him? Who killed him?”

“He was acting like a lunatic, he was manic,” she explained.

“And that’s when Craig said ‘I f**king killed him, let’s go’.”

F.L. also remembered seeing two knives on the dashboard at Regina Beach but that Scott Nelson kept asking the accused about where one of them had gone.

Kemp remembered it differently in the car. She said it was once they were back in the city and had all met in a parking lot on the north edge of the city that she remembered hearing Pratt saying that he’d killed Misha — she remembered that it sounded like he was trying to end a conversation.

Pratt had been asked about that when he took the stand, he said he might have said it, but blamed it on being drunk and a “fool”.

In his questioning, defence lawyer Andrew Hitchcock showed Zander surveillance footage from a gas station the group visited when they arrived back in Regina. She pointed her attention to the right hand of one of the guys in the group, not the accused, and she said it looked like his hand was bloody.

And when he did his cross-examination of F.L., Hitchcock challenged her remembering of who was involved, pointing to the transcript from the preliminary hearing for Scott Nelson that said there may have been one more person following Misha, and that same person was involved in private conversations at Regina Beach.