Former police officer Beau Lamarre-Condon enters witness box in Sydney double murder trial

Lamarre-Condon gives evidence in court after pleading not guilty to murdering Jesse Baird and Luke Davies in early 2024

Live updates: Beau Lamarre-Condon gives evidence in murder trial

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Former officer Beau Lamarre-Condon has alleged he heard homophobic abuse when working for New South Wales police, as the 31-year-old gave evidence in his double murder trial in Sydney.

Lamarre-Condon is accused of fatally shooting couple Jesse Baird and Luke Davies with his police service weapon in Baird’s Paddington home on 19 February 2024.

He has pleaded not guilty to two counts of murder and one charge of aggravated break and enter.

Lamarre-Condon on Thursday started giving evidence at the NSW supreme court in front of a 15-person jury. He was the first witness for the defence.

Wearing a light grey suit, a dark coloured tie and a white collared shirt, Lamarre-Condon vowed to tell the truth.

He accused a former supervisor of making homophobic remarks while he was working as an openly gay police officer.

“He would say things such as ‘I used to bash gay people while in Jindabyne’,” Lamarre-Condon told the court on Thursday.

On one occasion, when responding to a domestic violence report, the supervisor allegedly said “Let’s go get these fucking faggots”, the jury was told.

Lamarre-Condon told the jury on another occassion a coworker shot himself in the head. He recalled in court the last conversation the pair had.

“I said ‘How are you’ and he told me he was good. Nothing appeared out of normal to me, nothing about his behaviour suggested what he was about to do,” Lamarre-Condon told the court.

“[He later] went to his desk, took out his gun whilst off duty and shot himself in the head at work.”

Lamarre-Condon’s coworkers found their deceased colleague, the court heard.

Asked about his relationship with Baird, Lamarre-Condon told the jury: “For the months of October and November 2022 it was friends with a sexual relationship. When we would meet up it was of the sexual nature. By December 2022, that’s when we began going on romantic dates.”

Prosecution lawyers wrapped up their case earlier on Thursday morning. They called more than 50 witnesses, played hours of CCTV footage and shared pages of social media messages over the first seven weeks of the trial.

Lamarre-Condon’s defence team has previously claimed Baird and Davies were accidentally shot in two separate struggles with the accused when he was acting in “self-defence”.

The officer cleaned up the scene and disposed of the bodies afterwards because he “panicked considerably”, the defence lawyer John Stratton SC previously said.

Fuente: The Guardian World