MARTIN: Night out with friend took tragic turn in an instant

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The tragic murder of Banff native Ethan Enns-Goneau is quite illustrative of the fragility of life.

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Enns-Goneau, 26, was out for an evening of socializing on Aug. 4, 2022, when he and his friend, Bobby Lavery, decided to grab a nightcap at the Dancing Sasquatch bar on the national park town’s main drag shortly after midnight into the following day.

Video from the nightclub showed a smiling Enns-Goneau part company with Lavery as they arrived so the deceased could go to the washroom while his friend headed upstairs to the bar.

Less than two minutes later Enns-Goneau was collapsing in the hall outside the men’s room suffering mortal stab wounds at the hand of convicted killer John Christopher Arrizza.

While much remains unknown about what occurred after Enns-Goneau entered the washroom Arrizza was already occupying, with all respect to defence lawyer Katherin Beyak, there are facts which can be gleaned from the evidence.

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Beyak, in her final address to Calgary jurors last week where she sought a manslaughter conviction, suggested no one knows what occurred in the 78 seconds before Arrizza was captured on a surveillance camera pushing Enns-Goneau into the hallway and stabbing his victim a final four times.

But a few details, other than Arrizza’s admission he stabbed Enns-Goneau 11 times in total, can be deduced from the evidence put before jurors by Crown prosecutors Ron Simenik and Patrick Bigg.

One of those, from the victim’s autopsy, indicated he had just 20 ml of urine in his bladder at the time of his death.

As Bigg pointed out in his final submission to jurors, a can of pop contains 355 ml, so his bladder was virtually empty.

Surveillance video showed Enns-Goneau starting to undo his pants before entering the washroom, and his pants were still undone when he was pushed into the hallway 78 seconds later.

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That would suggest for a good portion of the time Enns-Goneau was in the washroom he was relieving himself and not goading Arrizza into a fight as the accused suggested shortly after his arrest.

“I mean, the guy … started talking to me,” Arrizza said without prompting as he sat, handcuffed in the back of an RCMP cruiser just outside the bar.

“Is it illegal officer, to talk (crap)?” he said.

He also told Cpl. Sheldon Silveira he was scared.

“Would you put that in my statement? I was scared,” a clearly intoxicated Arrizza asked Silveira.

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Only Arrizza knows exactly what happened behind the closed washroom door, but he didn’t take the witness stand to offer an explanation.

Maybe he didn’t like the way Enns-Goneau looked at him. Perhaps the also intoxicated victim said something which set Arrizza off, justifiably, or not.

What is known is that an apparently happy-go-lucky Enns-Goneau went to the washroom with the intention of relieving himself and in a little more time than it would take to do that he was dying on the floor of a nightclub hallway.

Ultimately jurors rejected the defence that Arrizza was too intoxicated to form the intent to commit murder and convicted him of second-degree murder.

Video surveillance and evidence from Arrizza’s roommates made it clear he was intoxicated that night, but not too impaired he couldn’t form the intent to kill Enns-Goneau, or at least cause him grievous bodily harm that was likely to cause his death.

It’s impossible to know what was in the mind of the victim as Arrizza repeatedly stabbed him.

But suffice to say he couldn’t have expected a night out with friends on a summer’s night in one of the most beautiful places on earth would have ended so tragically and violently.

In the blink of an eye a young life was snuffed out while another was left to face the legal consequences of his actions for the rest of his life.

KMartin@postmedia.com

X: @KMartinCourts

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