Stepping down from the witness stand after his third day of testimony, the Whitby man who alleges he was severely beaten by an off-duty Toronto police officer and his brother said he’s relieved the questioning is over. “I feel like I can breathe a little bit better,” said Dafonte Miller, leaving an Oshawa courthouse Friday afternoon alongside family members. “I don’t have to come back, I just feel a little bit better.”Asked what it was like to be in the same room as Const. Michael Theriault and his brother Christian, the 22-year-old said, “he didn’t let it bother me as much as people might think.”“I didn’t look at them.”The Theriault brothers are jointly charged with aggravated assault and separately charged with attempt to obstruct justice in a Dec. 28, 2016, confrontation that seriously injured Miller, then 19, and resulted in the loss of his left eye. The Theriault brothers have pleaded not guilty before Superior Court Justice Joseph Di Luca.Miller has been cross-examined by Michael Lacy, a lawyer for Michael Theriault, since Wednesday afternoon. Lacy at times suggested Miller was changing or altering his story based on hearing what others had testified. The lawyer’s questions highlighted differences in evidence Miller had given at trial versus what he said during the February 2018 preliminary inquiry and in past interviews with investigators.“With all due respect,” Miller said at one point on Thursday, “I’m not trying to be a storyteller up here.”Court has heard conflicting accounts of what happened immediately before a violent encounter between Miller and the Theriault brothers on Whitby’s Erickson Drive. In harrowing testimony Wednesday, Miller told the court he was punched, kicked and struck by a metal pipe after the brothers approached him and two friends on the street and asked them what they were doing there. After that initial exchange int ...
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