Accused didn’t trust cops, court told

Mississauga man on trial in cover-up of female housemate’s 2017 death

A Mississauga man who testified to covering up the December 2017 murder of his female housemate — by concealing and then burying her body — told a Brampton court Monday that he lied to police about his involvement because he didn’t trust law enforcement.

During the final day of cross-examination from Crown attorney Brian McGuire, Shaofeng Han, who is being accused of killing Yunying Pan, said he continued to distance himself from her death during his interrogation by police, even when investigators presented evidence that her blood was found in the trunk of his car and that police who started trailing him following her disappearance had observed him disposing her shoes.

McGuire told Han that “police had evidence that implicated you in her disappearance, agreed?” To which Han agreed.

“So, why not drop the act at that point?” McGuire asked.

Han said he lied “because, at the time, I didn’t have my own lawyer. I don’t trust the police.” Han added that he felt that telling the truth would result in him being “wrongfully convicted and wrongfully executed.”

Han agreed with McGuire that police were telling the truth when they suggested that he was spotted throwing out her shoes and that her blood was in the trunk of his car, where he had hid the body, after finding her dead the night of Dec. 5, 2017.

Han, 55, went on to distance himself from the Crown’s theory that the divorced father of a 25-year-old son killed Pan because she rejected his romantic advances and that she was noisy. Han testified to complaining to the landlord about Han making noise, but said things got better. Han also admitted to jokingly suggesting to Pan that he wanted to be her boyfriend.

“You just speculate that I had any romantic relationship with Ms. Pan,” Han said. “Those speculations are totally not true.”

Han, who took the stand in his own defence, has pled not guilty to second-degree murder, saying he hatched an elaborate coverup to escape blame for Pan’s killing — a murder he says he didn’t commit.

The jury has heard in Han’s own words how Pan, 40, who had moved into the Strathaven Drive townhouse in Mississauga as a tenant on Nov. 25, was stuffed into a large travel bag, placed in the trunk of his car — where she was kept for hours — before her body was stashed in two locations, then buried.

Speaking via a Mandarin interpreter, Han testified that he found Pan covered in blood and unconscious on the night of Dec. 5, 2017, on the steps inside the townhouse but covered it up because he feared that the Canadian judicial system would, in his words, execute him even though he wasn’t responsible for her death.

“In my mind, I still use the Chinese mentality to think, anything to do with the law,” Han said Monday, adding that he feared that Canadian law was similar to China, where, according to him, innocent people are sometimes wrongfully accused by corrupt police and sentenced to death.

“I never killed her,” Han said. During the opening of his testimony last week, Han said he was watching a movie in his room upstairs when he decided to go down to the ground floor sometime after 7:30 p.m.

When he got to the bottom of the stairs, “I was so shocked by the thing that I saw,” Han testified, adding that Pan was face-down on the stairs.

“There was a lot of blood on her,” the stairs and the wall, he said. He called out to her but there was no response, “then I pushed her and no response at all.”

Han testified he found the rear sliding glass doors open wide, suggesting that “someone escaped from there.”

At around 9:30 p.m., that night, Han said he backed his car into the garage of the townhouse so he could place the body, now inside the travel bag, into the trunk of his Toyota Corolla. The following morning he drove the body away from the townhouse complex.

The following afternoon, Han, a driving school instructor who moved to Canada from China in 2006, said he drove Pan’s Lexus SUV to a parking lot near Square One Shopping Centre, where he ditched it and where it was later discovered.

Han was not charged until Jan. 26, 2018, weeks after Pan’s disappearance prompted police to carry out surveillance on Han’s daily routine, the jury has heard.

In her opening to the jury, codefence counsel Leah Shafran said the suitcase remained in Han’s trunk until the earlier hours of Dec. 7, before he left it somewhere in Scarborough.

“In the days that followed, Mr. Han moved the suitcase two more times,” Shafran said. He then buried the suitcase behind Mississauga’s Dewey College.

On March 29, 2019, Peel police announced that human remains were found in a wooded area near Matheson Boulevard and Kennedy Road in Mississauga. It was later determined that the remains belonged to Pan.