Man on trial for attempted police murder says homemade gun went off by accident during standoff

Michael Arcand, the Edmonton man on trial for the attempted murder of a Saskatoon police officer, says his homemade gun went off accidentally and that he never meant to hurt anybody.

Arcand, 35, testified at his own trial Friday at Saskatoon's Court of Queen's Bench. The Crown alleges that Arcand meant to kill Sgt. Grant Linklater during a brief but tense standoff on a pedestrian-heavy stretch of downtown Saskatoon in September 2017.

The trial has heard that Arcand was wielding two metal pipes that, when slammed together, form what Arcand called a "slamfire shotgun."

Witnesses have recalled Arcand "pumping" the weapon several times as police officers and a canine-unit dog surrounded him.

At one point, as Arcand refused orders to stand down, officers fired at him with both a Taser and a beanbag shotgun.

"I anticipated both hits, and my body twisted, and as I recovered from the beanbag, as soon as my foot touched the ground, that's when the gun went off," said Arcand.

Arcand was short on sleep, high on coke and meth, and terrified of being bitten by the dog or shot by police, he told the court.

He how ended up in Saskatoon

"How did it get so far?" Arcand remembered thinking of the quickly escalating standoff.

His Friday testimony filled in the details.

Arcand's girlfriend was a student at the Saskatchewan Indian Institute of Technologies (SIIT) downtown campus. The couple drove to Saskatoon early on the morning of Sept. 27 in their Ford station wagon.

Arcand admitted to using cocaine and methamphetamine during the trip and in Saskatoon the day of the standoff.

Under his driver's seat lay the homemade weapon.

Gun was protection from gang

Taking his cues from a YouTube video, Arcand had made the weapon out of parts salvaged from his girlfriend's yard in Onion Lake Cree Nation: one bar from a bike, another from an old trampoline.

The shotgun shells recovered by police from the barrel pipe and Arcand's clothing came from the attic.

The weapon was protection against a gang that had threatened Arcand's life in Onion Lake, he told the court.

Shortly before his path crossed with police, Arcand sat inside the station wagon, parked in the SIIT parking lot, waiting for his girlfriend. He got out of the car with the two pieces of pipe, having decided to put the weapon in the rear of the station wagon, "out of reach."

Then he realized he'd locked himself out of the car. Workers on a nearby scaffold laughed at him, he recalled.

"The more time goes by, the more I start to panic," said Arcand, a member of Alberta's Alexander First Nation.

"I'm Native, and downtown, trying to break into a vehicle, and I know how it looks to people who don't understand what's going on."

Tunnel vision

Shortly after Arcand broke one of the car windows, a police officer showed up.

A cellphone video taken by a bystander, who cannot be identified, was played in court Friday. It showed Arcand refusing to stand down as he grasped his weapon. He passed a red dumpster, but still walked on with his weapon.

"In no way did I point it at the officer," he said.

"Everything was almost like tunnel vision," Arcand said of his drug-infused state.

"I'm not a violent person," he added, before admitting to previous assault convictions.

Arcand then recounted the rest of the standoff, which ended when he rounded a street corner and was shot in the shoulder and hand by a police officer.

"There was no intent to try to hurt anybody," he said.

Defending himself against dog

Arcand did try, unsuccessfully, to shoot his gun at the police dog, but only to defend himself, he said.

He also admitted to reloading his pipe gun while fleeing police.

No civilians or officers were wounded that day.

Arcand's judge-only trial began Monday and is expected to continue next week.