Shortly before Aly Sunderani was gunned down outside the Guelph Comfort Inn in 2016, "something wasn't right."
And so began the first-degree murder trial of Raja Dosanjh in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice on Tuesday.
The trial, being heard by Justice Gordon Lemon, is expected to last up to seven weeks.
Sunderani, 35, managed the Comfort Inn for his parents, who owned the Silvercreek Parkway North hotel.
On a windy and cold day March 1, 2016, as he often did, he went to the Lucky Belly restaurant on Woolwich Street for lunch.
But the owner of the restaurant, who knew Sunderani well, noticed something different that day about Sunderani.
"Something wasn't right with Mr. Sunderani. He was distracted. His phone was going incessantly. He kept looking around," said Crown attorney Julia Forward Tuesday in her opening statement to the trial's six-man, six-woman jury.
Sunderani left the restaurant and made the short drive back to the hotel in his black Range Rover, parking as he always did just outside the main entrance.
"As he got out of his SUV he was gunned down. Instantly," Forward said.
Court heard a tall, slim person wearing a pulled-up hoodie came up behind him and shot him "upwards" of 12 times in the back with a 9 mm submachine gun equipped with a silencer.
The assailant dropped the gun and fled the scene in a waiting car.
Sunderani died later in hospital.
Police later found 18 shell casings, one unspent bullet and several bullet fragments at the scene.
There is hotel surveillance video showing the shooting, but it shows the shooter from the waist down.
Dosanjh was arrested almost a year later in Burnaby, B.C., where he lived.
He had been in Ontario, where he has family ties, at the time of the shooting, flying in the month before and returning to B.C. the day after the shooting, court heard.
His mother and two sisters sat in the near-empty courtroom on Tuesday while Dosanjh, a tall, slim man wearing a checkered grey suit and tie, sat beside his attorneys.
Forward said DNA evidence links the 26-year-old to Dosanjh to the gun used to kill Sunderani. He is also connected to a rental car that was at the scene at the time of the shooting.
No possible motive for the killing was mentioned in the Crown's opening remarks.
Defence counsel Julianna Greenspan did not make any opening remarks on the first day of the trial and declined comment at the end of the day.
It is not known if the defence will call any witnesses or if Dosanjh will take the stand in his own defence.
