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Hello and welcome to our live coverage of Beau Lamarre-Condon’s criminal trial in the NSW Supreme Court in Sydney.
Lamarre-Condon, 31, has pleaded not guilty to two counts of murder over the deaths of Jesse Baird, 26, a former TV presenter, and Luke Davies, 29, a Qantas flight attendant, in Paddington on February 19, 2024. His case is that he acted in self-defence, the 15-person jury has been told.
The former NSW police officer started giving evidence on Thursday and returns to the witness box at 10am today for cross-examination by Crown prosecutor Brett Hatfield, SC.
Here are the key parts of his evidence on Friday:
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Crown prosecutor Brett Hatfield, SC, is asking Lamarre-Condon to mark up a floor plan of Baird’s Paddington home.
He told the court on Friday that there were moving boxes in the hallway of the terrace and in the kitchen when he entered the house on February 19, 2024, and he is marking up the document to indicate where those boxes were.
The court has heard that Baird was moving out of the share house at the time of his death. Lamarre-Condon has told the court he was unaware of this, but has admitted to using Baird’s phone after he died to send messages to the former TV presenter’s housemates about the move.
Crown prosecutor Brett Hatfield, SC, asks Lamarre-Condon about his evidence on Friday that he was pinned against a kitchen wall before he fired the first shot at Jesse Baird.
“I was pinned directly before I pushed [him] back and fired the shot,” Lamarre-Condon said.
Lamarre-Condon is back in the witness box and is being cross-examined about the first shot he says he fired at Jesse Baird.
He told the court on Friday that he had the gun in his right hand and “nudged him back”, anywhere from about 20 centimetres to a metre. He said that he still had a hold of Baird with his left hand, with his gun in his right hand.
He said this morning that he “pushed him back as far as I could”.
“He’s moving backwards facing towards me,” he said. He said he “let go” and fired a shot towards Baird’s right shoulder.
Lamarre-Condon told the court the first shot he fired at Baird was deliberate and “was the right move; I stand by it”. He was trying to disarm Baird, he said.
“I was pinned up against the kitchen wall,” he said. “I essentially had Jesse with his left forearm pinning me up against the wall and he was swinging around the knife.”
The accused said that “at certain points Jesse’s left forearm was against my chest and then he would move it and then he would swing the knife with his right hand and … many times during this struggle both my hands were on his right hand trying to hold the knife away.”
He reached for his gun after Baird slashed his shirt with a knife, he said during cross-examination.
“I just maintained my left hand holding his right arm away from me while I reached for my firearm,” he said.
“I just remember pointing and aiming towards his right shoulder. We were close. At this point, I think I pushed him, I had the gun in my right hand and I had nudged him back to get a good further shot at him at his right shoulder, so, anywhere from 20 centimetres to a metre, but I still had a hold of his right hand with my left hand.”
The accused told the court last week that he hid upstairs for a time at Baird’s share house after hearing a noise and took off the high-vis jacket over his shirt.
He came downstairs when he believed he heard the front door close and saw Baird in the kitchen when he was at the bottom of the stairs, he said.
“Honestly at that time I was just going to lift up the visor and just tell him it’s me and ask for my stuff back,” he said. But he said Baird spotted him and started yelling: “We’re getting robbed.”
Baird lunged towards him with a knife, he said. At one point, he added, Baird “tore my whole blue shirt open”.
Lamarre-Condon has told the court he had his gun with him when he went to Baird’s house because he had contemplated taking his own life the night before due to work-related trauma and had planned to return the weapon to Miranda police station later that day.
He said that when he entered Baird’s home his firearm was “secreted under my shirt”.
“You could not see it. It was actually to the rear of me on a plain-clothes holster so no one could be under the impression that I had a firearm on me,” he said.
Lamarre-Condon told the court during his evidence-in-chief that he came across Jesse Baird in the kitchen of his home. Baird was holding a knife and tape as he sealed up packing boxes, the accused said.
He said Baird did not recognise him in the motorcycle helmet and lunged at him with the knife, leading to a struggle in which he shot Baird once to disarm him and shot him a second time by accident as they fell to the ground.
He told the court he stood by his decision to shoot Baird the first time and was responsible for his death but he did not intend to kill him.
In his opening address to the court, Crown prosecutor Brett Hatfield, SC, alleged Lamarre-Condon shot Baird “once through the right base of the neck near his shoulder and out through his jaw” once in the right temple in an “execution style shot”.
Lamarre-Condon denied shooting Baird in the back and said he was aiming for his shoulder to disarm him.
Crown prosecutor Brett Hatfield, SC, started cross-examining Lamarre-Condon late on Friday afternoon, shortly before court adjourned until Monday.
He started by questioning the accused about his account of what happened on February 19, 2024, on the morning Baird and Davies died of gunshot wounds from Lamarre-Condon’s police-issued pistol.
The former NSW police officer had said in his evidence-in-chief that the door to Baird’s share house was “partially open” and he knocked three times and said hello loudly before entering. He had arrived earlier in the morning and had seen both of Baird’s housemates leave the home, he said.
Lamarre-Condon said that he received no response to his knocks and he believed nobody was home.
Lamarre-Condon said during his evidence on Friday that he tried to assist police earlier to locate the bodies of Baird and Davies.
The court has heard he turned himself in to police on February 23, 2024, four days after the alleged murders. By Saturday, February 24, 2024, he was at the Silverwater Correctional Complex at the Metropolitan Remand and Reception Centre.
He said he told corrective services officers “multiple times” that he wanted to speak to police.
“I could see on the news [police searches for the bodies],” he said. “I said to the corrective officer, ‘I need to speak to police; I need to help them.’ They said, ‘sorry mate, you’re going to have to wait for the week’, like, no one’s at work today.”
Lamarre-Condon told the court on Friday that he was confronted with a “moral dilemma” after Baird and Davies died.
He said he knew the truth was he was “guilty of manslaughter [over Baird’s death] and manslaughter carries a maximum penalty of 25 years”.
“I’m a police officer [at the time],” he said. “Police officers put people in jail. People in jail want to kill cops.
“In my mind I was fearful that if I went to police that I knew that what I had done to Jesse, and Jesse only, was manslaughter and that if I did the right thing that I was signing my own death wish potentially by getting stabbed or killed in jail.” He said that Davies shot himself by accident.
He appeared to become emotional as he said it “was so conflicting because I really, really wanted to go to police but I was genuinely of the belief that if I go to jail that I’m going to be killed not because of who I am as a person but because of the uniform that I wear”.
