Three years of persistence sends killer to prison for 50 years
One on one with the lead detective
Staring at the phone on August 14, 2015, Detective Kevin McCloskey reflected on the summer that had just passed.
“What summer?” he quipped, three years later. Truth is, for seven-and-ahalf weeks, the homicide investigator and his team had spent nearly every waking minute hunting a killer.
When the phone rang, he learned that the hunt was over. The work, however, had just begun.
“Getting this ready for court was going to be 10 times the work than it was to investigate the case up until arrest,” Detective McCloskey said.
Sixty kilometres away in Barrie, Jason Hay sat on the sweltering hot shoulder of a highway, his hands cuffed behind his back. The 27-year-old was arrested for killing two people at a Vaughan café two months earlier. He had spent his last summer as a free man.
The summer was only three days old on June 24 when Hay, shrouded in a mask and hoodie, rushed into the Moka Café with a semi-automatic weapon and fired 11 shots, hitting four people. Two of those people— 24-year-old patron Christopher De Simone and 47-year-old server Maria Voci—were left dead at the scene.
During his month-long trial in May 2018, the jury never learned that those murders were not the first in which Hay had been involved. In fact, the charges he faced in the café shooting were only the latest on a record that included 58 criminal convictions, stretching back to childhood.
“This offender was easily one of the most violent people I have ever dealt with,” said Detective McCloskey.
The jury also never learned that when Hay’s image was first released to the public—captured on surveillance footage while he cased the Islington Avenue plaza the day before the murders—that it was a correctional officer who recognized him from a stint in Milhaven Institution who identified him to police.
Two guns recovered from the vehicle during the high-risk Highway 400 arrest were also barred from the dialogue in court.
That information would have easily compromised the integrity of the trial. But knowing the trail of victims Hay had left behind served as motivation for members of the Homicide Unit to put forth an airtight case and send the career criminal to prison for life.
“When you’re in court, you experience the emotion and grief of the families of victims,” Detective McCloskey said. “That’s when it resonates with you, the impact of the work police teams do.”
In this case, that work was plenty. Investigators conducted roughly 130 interviews and executed 40 warrants in the three-year span between the slayings and court proceedings.
Those warrants uncovered cellphone tower information that placed Hay at a Burger King in Toronto, calling for a cab hours after the murder. Just minutes earlier, surveillance cameras captured a Nissan Versa pulling into a nearby industrial area.
That stolen car, recovered by police a week later, was the same vehicle Hay drove to the Moka Café the morning of the shooting.
When investigators searched his phone, they also found a picture of Hay taken days before the shooting. He was seen smiling, wearing a Toronto Blue Jays baseball cap.
The cap was the same one he was seen wearing in the plaza’s surveillance footage the day before the murders.
"Ultimately that phone contained a lot of valuable evidence." Said Detective McCloskey.
The lead investigator believes that information gleaned from the phone was one of the greatest influences on the jury, who ultimately found Hay guilty of two counts of FirstDegree Murder and two counts of Attempted Murder on May 28.
After three years, the work of more than 100 officers who contributed to the investigation was finally done. “I could actually feel the stress physically leaving my body,” McCloskey said.
On July 8, Hay became only the sixth murderer in Canadian history to receive consecutive life sentences, putting him in prison for 50 years without chance of parole.
Read the rest of the 2018 Annual Report
Want to know how else York Regional Police made a difference in its community last year? Read our 2018 Annual Report.
