INMATES SPILL THE BEANS

Told Toronto Police What They Know About Murder

By the close of the weekend, Toronto homicide cops had interviewed all
38 "suspects" in the beating death of Toronto (Don) Jail inmate Kevon
Phillip - Toronto's first homicide victim of 2010 - and no doubt word
around the notorious facility is that no one had spilled a syllable.

Silence, after all, is not only code of the street, it is also the
primary survival tool when it comes to jailhouse etiquette.

But that code was broken.

Inside sources, their information later confirmed by Toronto homicide
Det.-Sgt. Peter Code, indicate that only one inmate refused to
co-operate with police.

The other 37 spilled.

"Everyone talked except one," Code said.

As reported here last Tuesday, within hours of being let out of
segregation after being caught for "hooping" 100 grams of compacted
marijuana bud up his rectum, Phillip was beaten beyond pulp on Jan. 2
in the shower room of Unit 2-A South, leaving homicide cops with a
captive audience of the 38 "suspects" in his cell block.

With 25 criminal convictions on his rap sheet, including one for
sexual assault, Phillip was in the Don on an immigration hold, and
facing deportation to his native Trinidad, a country he had not lived
in since the age of nine.

Up until then, he had been held at the Maplehurst Correctional
Institute while he stood on trial for car-theft indictments - car
theft and dangerous driving being the bulk of his prior convictions -
but was moved to the Don on a deportation order following his
acquittal of those charges.

During the days between Christmas and New Year's, corrections officers
at the Don suspected contraband drugs were in play on Unit 2-A South,
and rounded up 10-12 of the 39 inmates on the range that day for a
strip search.

Phillip was the only one who came up dirty and, as per protocol, was
placed in segregation.

While there, word apparently spread through the range that the
slightly built inmate - only 5 feet, 8 inches tall and unimposing -
had either snitched on those behind the "hooping," if indeed it had
been forced upon him as occasionally happens in prisons, or had
provided the names of drug users in the unit in order to avoid
additional charges.

Whatever, it not only sealed the deal, it sealed his
fate.

He was dead within hours of returning to his unit, making him the
second inmate to die in the Don since October.

His body now released from the coroner's office following autopsy,
Kevon Phillip's funeral will be held Friday afternoon at the chapel of
the Odgen Funeral Home in Scarborough, with interment to follow at
Christ the King Cemetery in Markham.

Jill O'Brien, who identified herself as a family spokesman, declined
comment yesterday, stating that "the family has been advised not to
speak to anyone in the media."

Over the weekend, however, Phillip's girlfriend of two years,
20-year-old Shawna Francis, was still trying to come to grips with
what happened - having not found out he was dead until she read it in
the newspapers.

"I hadn't spoken to him since Christmas because we had an argument,"
she said. "I was tired of him getting into trouble, tired of all his
promises, and, when he wanted me to bring him canteen money to the
Don, money I didn't have ... well, that was it.

"We argued, and that was that."

Francis, who said she met Phillip while waiting in the takeout line at
Willy's Jerk in the Jane St.-Wilson Ave. area, not far from where
Phillip rented a basement room, claimed she never questioned the fancy
cars he was often driving - even though the majority of them were stolen.

"Friends called him K-Dog," she said. "He'd show up in a Nissan Maxima
one day, then a Range Rover, and then a Benz.

"All he told me was that he had a friend in the car rental business,"
she said. "It wasn't until the last charges were laid that I learned
the truth."

It was news, read in this newspaper, that Phillip had been caught
"hooping" contraband at the Don, and that this may have set his death
in motion, that disturbed Shawna Francis the most.

'Smoked Weed'

"Yes, he smoked a little weed. Who doesn't?" she said. "But he never,
ever had more than a dime bag, if any at all, so he certainly wasn't
dealing drugs.

"I think he was forced - physically forced - to carry those drugs at
the Don. Under threat."

As of yesterday, Unit 2-A South, and its bank of 18 cells, was still
empty of inmates, the blue-purple haze of forensic luminol reflecting
the chemiluminescence of a great swath of blood that once stained the
shower stall at the end of the unit where Kevin Phillip was beaten and
stomped to death.

That end of the investigation was over.

"Never has so much evidence been gathered in one place for one
murder," said Code, indicating the first forensic team spent 15 solid
hours in the unit - collecting, bagging and tagging any and all
evidence found in the cells.

"Including every piece of clothing every inmate was wearing that day,"
he said.

According to Code, however, the sole inmate who refused to talk to
police is no more a suspect than the other 37 who spilled whatever
they decided to spill.

"None of them is going anywhere," he said.

And no charges have yet been laid.