Man who stabbed girlfriend in Metrotown parking lot found guilty of 2nd-degree murder

Melissa Blimkie is seen in this undated graduation photo. (IHIT handout)

Warning: This story contains disturbing details.

A man who pleaded guilty to manslaughter after stabbing his girlfriend to death in a parking lot at Burnaby’s Metrotown Mall was instead found guilty of second-degree murder, the judge finding he had specific intent to kill her despite his claims otherwise.

Everton Javaun Downey was charged with second-degree murder for the Dec. 19, 2021, offence, and acknowledged he killed Melissa Blimkie by stabbing her. However, he testified in B.C. Supreme Court that the victim threw a white powder at him that made him intoxicated and unable to control his actions.

But in her judgement handed down Thursday, Associate Chief Justice Heather Holmes found that Downey was “not truthful or sincere in describing his perceptions and state of mind before, during, and after the offence.”

The murder and arrest

The court heard the North Vancouver couple planned to go Christmas shopping the morning of the murder. Two minutes after parking, Downey stabbed Blimkie 15 times with a folded knife. Bystanders found her crying out and bleeding in the parkade stairwell and despite “prompt medical intervention,” the 25-year-old did not survive.

Downey immediately left the scene, got into a woman’s minivan, and asked her for a ride to the hospital, which she declined, according to the decision. Holmes summarized a number of other interactions Downey had with members of the public directly after the killing, during which he entered multiple people’s apartments and approached strangers on the street to ask for help.

In one apartment, Downey hid the knife and his bloodstained clothes, and took new clothes from the building’s laundry area. In his final interaction, Downey approached a woman walking her dog and asked her to call police.

“Mr. Downey was crying, and said several times that someone had drugged him, and that he had hurt someone,” the judgment reads. He told arriving police he was turning himself in.

At the Burnaby RCMP detachment, the court heard, Downey repeatedly accused police of trying to poison him, insisted he needed medical attention, and “began to shout, and to scream or wail loudly and continually, as though in pain.”

“He shouted that he could not breathe, and he screamed and sobbed while he moved his torso forward and back,” Holmes wrote. “When the police then tried to put him in the restraint chair, he became even more worked-up, and screamed that he was dying.”

An ambulance arrived and took Downey to hospital and the doctor who treated him testified he had no injuries, no signs of visual or auditory delusion or need for mental health stabilization.

When he was told he was being discharged, the doctor said Downey became agitated again, screaming and shaking the bedrail and repeatedly claiming his back was broken, he couldn’t breathe and that he was dying.

“In my view, a clear attempt to manipulate and stall the return to the Burnaby cells,” Holmes noted.

Downey was released from the Burnaby RCMP detachment the following day and immediately took a bus to Brentwood Mall where he robbed a bank, the court heard. He passed the teller a note that read “all the tiller $ or I shoot.” The employee gave him $112 in coins.

A warrant was issued for Downey’s arrest for the bank robbery, and he remained at large until Dec. 25, when he approached police in a Richmond parking lot and turned himself in. He was charged with second-degree murder in January.

‘Strange developments’ before the murder

During the trial, Downey testified his relationship with Blimkie was a loving one, but he experienced “strange developments” in the weeks leading up to her killing.

“As will become clear, some of the evidence Mr. Downey gave cannot possibly have described actual reality,” Holmes said. “It is important to note that Mr. Downey spoke in his testimony about these strange events as though they were actual events. He was not describing what he understood at the time to be real but came later to recognize as a product of delusional or distorted thinking.”

For example, Downey testified he found a “tiny computer chip” on his B.C. identification card, that strangers would “throw powder at him that had an intoxicating effect,” and that while driving, “someone was underneath the car with a magnet,” making his knife and keys fall.

“Mr. Downey described one such incident that, he testified, took place two or three days before the offence. As Mr. Downey came out of the washroom in the apartment, he saw Ms. Blimkie putting powder in his drink. He ‘flipped out,’ grabbed or shook her, and hit her in the face with his open hand because he was upset that she was trying to kill him,” the judgement reads.

He also claimed in court that an unknown voice, perhaps the police or “some form of AI,” was “speaking directly into Ms. Blimkie’s ear,” giving instructions to hurt him.

Downey testified the voices were talking to his girlfriend on the morning of the offence and that while in the parkade she threw a drug at him that made him black out and lose control.

During cross-examination, he said that at the RCMP detachment “police were drugging him non-stop by flicking powder at him from their pockets,” according to the judgement.

‘Clearly not a reliable witness’

The judge was asked to consider whether Downey was not criminally responsible by reason of mental disorder, which she addressed briefly in her ruling, saying the evidence did not support the designation.

“No expert medical evidence was tendered concerning Mr. Downey’s psychiatric state at the time of the offence or later. Also, there is no evidence that Mr. Downey had a psychiatric history or had been prescribed anti-psychotic medication before or after the offence. Nor is there evidence that any of the mental health issues he may have faced, such as ADHD, PTSD, or paranoia, had the types of consequences described in (the Criminal Code),” she wrote.

Regarding Downey’s testimony, Holmes said he “was clearly not a reliable witness whose account of the events can be taken as actual fact,” noting the “strange events” he provided as evidence “cannot possibly have taken place.”

Moreover, the judge found several issues with Downey’s credibility, saying his “inability to give even approximate dates or a rough sequence with any consistency was remarkable given the nature of some of the events he was describing and the effects on him he said they produced.”

The judge also pointed out implausible features in his testimony, such as the fact he said he loved Blimkie and wanted to continue living with her despite his belief she was trying to poison him and listening to voices telling her to hurt him.

Downey’s recollection of the killing was inconsistent as well, the court heard. He was “emphatic” in denying the stabbing happened in the stairwell—which “abundant evidence” established as the location—despite claiming he had no memory of the stabbing at all due to being blacked out from a drug thrown at him.

“The reasonable inference is that it was important to Mr. Downey’s narrative to deny that he and Ms. Blimkie were in the stairwell because, as he himself noted, they had no reason to be there for the shopping they were at Metrotown to do,” the judgement reads.

The judge pointed out more inconsistencies around the events immediately after the stabbing, explaining Downey’s conduct around the witnesses he approached or on surveillance video did not give the impression he was “blacked out” or afraid for his life.

For example, Holmes said, “It seems very unlikely that Mr. Downey could have been ‘blacked out’ when he divested himself of the knife he used to kill Ms. Blimkie by hiding it under a roll of carpet.”

“Doing so also seems inconsistent with Mr. Downey being in fear of his life: the knife was his only defensive weapon, he testified, and it was one which he customarily carried for his protection. More likely was that Mr. Downey knew full well that the knife was damaging evidence against him.”

The judgement further notes, among a number of other circumstances casting doubt on his credibility, Downey never complained to police that they were “flicking drugs in his face” as he had testified, despite having “no difficulty complaining to the police about many other things.”

“In some ways, Mr. Downey also showed a discerning, even canny, state of mind during his time in custody. For example, during one of his episodes of coughing and screaming, during which he repeatedly declared that he could not breathe and called for an ambulance, he paused for a while and looked around the room as though to check the reaction to his conduct,” Holmes added.

The court also heard Downey didn’t mention the incident wherein, he said, Blimkie drugged his drink to the psychiatrists who interviewed him, despite the importance of the event in his narrative, and there was no reference to him being referred for psychiatric treatment in the clinical records.

“For the various reasons I have given, I find that Mr. Downey was not truthful or sincere in describing his perceptions and state of mind before, during, and after the offence,” Holmes ruled.

Guilty finding

The judge was ultimately satisfied there was no reasonable doubt Downey specifically intended to kill Blimkie or cause her bodily harm he knew was likely to cause death, the requirement for a second-degree murder conviction.

“To stab Ms. Blimkie, Mr. Downey had to remove the folding knife from his pocket and open it to extend the blade. He stabbed Ms. Blimkie a full fifteen times. This was a purposeful and sustained attack. Mr. Downey also fled the scene immediately, leaving Ms. Blimkie alone in a stairwell. He did nothing to assist her, and he made no effort to enlist others to do so,” Holmes said.

“The only reasonable inference from these facts is that Mr. Downey intended to kill Ms. Blimkie, or at least to cause her serious bodily harm that he knew was likely to cause her death, without caring whether she died or not.”

The judge also found “no basis” that Downey’s ADHD, PTSD, anxiety, paranoia, or frequent cannabis use would have interfered with his understanding of his actions.

“This is because immediately after inflicting the fifteen stab wounds, Mr. Downey acted with complete control of his thoughts and actions in the many ways I have described,” she wrote.

Holmes added that Downey’s unusual behaviour and claims of medical distress while in police custody did not change her conclusion about his state of mind during the stabbing itself.