It was as he banged on a stranger’s door for help — first with one hand, then both — that Dafonte Miller began to understand that he was hurt. Badly. He knew he’d been hit to the point where he “wasn’t really feeling it no more.” The six-foot-four, 175-pound Miller had taken punches and kicks to his body, he claimed, from an off-duty cop and his brother. Just seconds before, the officer had struck him on the head with a metal pipe, Miller said.But it wasn’t until he saw blood “pouring” onto the ground outside the home on the residential Whitby street where he’d sought help, to no avail, that Miller realized he was bleeding “profusely.”By the time the Durham Regional Police arrived on the scene, all Miller could look at was the blood still pouring out of him. “I didn’t think that I was going to make it to the hospital,” Miller told a rapt Oshawa courtroom. Wearing a prosthesis where his left eye once was, the towering Miller sat in the witness box for the first time Wednesday during the criminal trial of Toronto police Const. Michael Theriault and his younger brother Christian Theriault. The brothers are jointly charged with aggravated assault and separately charged with attempting to obstruct justice in a December 2016 violent incident that seriously injured Miller, then 19. Both men have pleaded not guilty in the judge-alone trial before Superior Court Justice Joseph Di Luca.With courtroom benches filled with supporters of both Miller and the Theriaults, the gallery fell silent as the soft-spoken Miller, 22, detailed his account of the night when he incurred multiple injuries, including an eyeball rupture that left him permanently blinded in one eye. As court heard the frantic 911 call that Miller placed that day, some of his family and friends seated in benches near the front began crying.“Hello, 911?” Miller can be heard saying, before Michael Theriault ...
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