Suspicion - A major update in the Mount Olive case is forcing a closer look at everything we thought we knew

Episode Date: June 29, 2026

For years, the legal fate of Awet Asfaha and his co-accused Christopher Sheriffe seemed sealed — appeals exhausted, the book closed. But Toronto Star chief investigative reporter Kevin Donovan reveals something that happened in a Toronto courtroom recently that has cracked the case wide open again.

From the Toronto Star, I'm Kevin Donovan, and this is season four of suspicion. Murder on Mount Olive. To help you understand more about the case of Chris Sheriff, we're doing a number of bonus episodes following the twists and turns of the case. Today, a major update. A wet Asphaha, who, like Chris, had long maintained his innocence, has confessed. He now admits he shot Bish and Golub. His confession is part part of his bid for early parole. It was a shocker to me.

Here's my conversation with Toronto Star producer, Julia DeLorentis Johnston. Joining us to discuss this latest news is Kevin Donovan, the chief investigative reporter for the Toronto Star. He's the host of murder on Mount Olive, the most recent season of the Star's True Crime Podcast Suspicion, that did a comprehensive deep dive into this entire case, and he's here to break this major new development. Kevin, welcome. Thanks for having me.

Thank you for being here. Okay, let's start here with a bit of a catch-up on the whole story. So you've been following this case for a long time. And it's the focus of the latest season of the Toronto Star podcast, as I mentioned, murder on Mount Olive. Get it wherever you get your podcasts. And in that podcast, you spent months looking into this 2009 barbecue shooting that sent Chris Sheriff away for life, a conviction he has always strongly disputed. meanwhile his co-accused the gunman awet asfaha was on a very different path so for our listeners who are just

tuning in what did the crown's original case against these two men look like on paper and why did it seem like the court's head permanently closed the book on this story back in 2009 a man named bishn gallop you mentioned shot dead three bullets in his in his back on mount olive drive in north West Toronto. It was a pretty quick rush to judgment. Both Chris and Awet are arrested within hours of that happening. There was a trial three years later in 2012, and the jury found quite quickly that they were both guilty. Juries don't give reasons for why they found a person guilty or not guilty. They just found them guilty, and they were sentenced to life imprisonment, but 25 years before, they can apply for parole. And they both tried various appeals right up to the Supreme Court of

Canada and lost. That final decision was in around 2015. So the book was closed on that because there was no other way to overturn their conviction. However, there are other opportunities to send it back to court, which is something that Chris Sheriff is trying right now. And then this bombshell, I didn't know about just to happen a month ago where Awet Asfaha, who was, by all accounts, the shooter, comes forward and says, in fact, he had been lying all along. He was the shooter. He had said there was a mysterious third man was a shooter. He was the shooter, and he wanted to get out on parole early. So that's where we are now. Right. What a stunning admission. So that is the catalyst for what is called now the faint hope hearing. So for listeners who might not be familiar with that

term, can you explain what a faint hope hearing is under Canadian law who qualifies for it? And what's a judge and jury? What are they being asked to decide here? Yeah, and it's an interesting small part of Canadian criminal law that if you are sentenced to life imprisonment with no chance of parole for 25 years, you have a faint hope of getting out earlier starting at your 15th year of incarceration. And Owett now is at his 17th year in 2026. And the Criminal Code and Canadian common law recognizes that people can change. And so it gives an inmate an opportunity to say, listen, I've ticked all the boxes. I've been a very good inmate, a model prisoner, and I'm never going to reoffend.

So that's why it's called the Faint Hope. These are very rare. We cover a few of them at the Toronto Star. I can't tell you how many there are, but this is the first one I've ever been involved in, and I've been doing this for 42 years. Okay, so you were there during his admission. You had tried to reach out to O'WET throughout the process of researching for the podcast, but you never got in contact.

You were buffed, as you told me. So what was the immediate raw reaction from inside the courtroom when he made this admission? Well, when he made this admission, it was a courtroom at 361 University, which is our main criminal court in Toronto. And he came to the stand. he'd been in the court the entire time, just watching, and he goes to the stand. He is very low-key, not much of an affect, as a psychologist said about him once. And he begins by saying, I lied at my trial in 2012. When I said I had nothing to do with it, and this mysterious man

was the shooter, and that in 2012 he was saying that Chris Sheriff seemed to be involved as well in this. He said, I lied about all of that. And I shot Bishon and he uses his first name. The reaction in the courtroom, O'et, who is the one who's doing the faint hope, his entire family is there. They know this is coming, so there's not much of reaction from him. A few members of the family of the victim, Bishin Golub, were there, including his widow. And she heard him say this. She started crying, and then she left and did not return.

I did see because there was an open Zoom link. I was there in person, but there was an open Zoom link, and I did see that some family was still on watching over the next few days. It's an upsetting thing to have something like this dredged up. The family of Bishin Gullab felt that, you know, they'd lost a good man. He was a complete innocent bystander when he was shot dead. And they would have liked, by their own admission, to have had closure back in 2012 when the murder took place. And this is the first time that they ever got an account. I don't think they got everything they wanted. I think they would have liked as hard as it would have been some more description of why he did this.

But they got what they got. We'll be right back. To understand, maybe to more fully understand why the confession matters so much to now the co-accused, Chris, Sheriff, we have to look back at the 2012 trial files. A major point of controversy involves a junior police officer who testified that sheriff was the leader of a local street gang called The Hustle Squad, but during your investigation, you discovered that the guns and gangs, which is a specialized gang unit inside the Toronto Police Department, had never heard of this group. The trial jury ruled that unverified informant hearsay was inadmissible, but the jury ended up hearing it anyway. So from what you gathered in those files, how much did that specific issue shape the context that? led to the original conviction?

Well, I think that what you referenced here, Julie, was the reason that that jury back then. It was, by the way, it was a jury that began with 12 and ended up with 11. There was one person of color on the jury, and he got sick. And so it was a jury of 11 white people that convicted him. And by the way, it was at a time, the Eaton Center shooting, which is an infamous shooting in Toronto, not far from the courtroom, happened actually during that trial.

And people were on edge in the city. And this junior officer, Amon Nassar, who's now actually serves at a different police force in Western Canada, but Nassar comes to the stand and he testifies about how O'WET was putting in work to try and join a gang, but that Chris was actually a gang member. And I think the jury heard that and thought, well, he's a, this is a frightening situation to have this person as a gang member, part of the, you mentioned the Hustle Squad, which is part of, of the James Town Crips. And I think that was a huge impact on them.

As you point out, the judge did rule that he couldn't say what he said, but when he actually testified in front of the jury, he said that anyways. And so that's one of the things that, to me, was a miscarriage of justice. And so now we have a situation where there's a whole new trial. And this faint hope hearing, it has a jury. This is in 2026. It has a jury, but they're not told to determine guilt. The faint hope hearing is all about, is he rehabilitated man? So we got two different juries, but they're asked to do different things. So the testimony painted an intense picture of Owett, especially considering his original conviction of killing an instant man.

So I'm curious about the support that he received. It seems remarkable. You told me about there was a life coach involved. There was a guard that stepped up to testify saying that he had never before done such a thing for an inmate. Can you tell me more about that? My context for this is I've never been to a faint hope hearing. I've covered a lot of court cases. And usually people in authority, like prison guards, are against the person who is on trial. But this isn't a trial. And so there was quite a literal parade of witnesses that.

that Brianna Vandebeek, who's O'Wet, Asfa's lawyer, brought to court. There were several prison guards that had dealt with O'WET over the years. One of them spoke quite eloquently about how he believes he is a changed man. I mean, they actually had a really interesting origin story because back in 2013, so that's one year after the conviction, O'Wett was serving time in Kent Institution, which is in the west coast of Canada, but it's a maximum security. You start at maximum, and an inmate tries to get down to minimum, which O'WET has done. And in 2013, a year after the trial, there's a dispute, a prisoner comes up to O'WET and slices him,

basically from here, from the top of his head, down to here. This guard that I mentioned is the one who gives him first aid, and he got up to the stand, and he said, that's how I met O'Wed Asfah. and, you know, he's been attacked by somebody. There's gang concerns in these prisons. He said, I've never seen more blood in my life. We got him airlifted out of the prison and stitched up. Afterwards, there were some times when O'Wet didn't want to come back to prison.

He's got to come back. So he was on a suicide watch. There was some self-harm. Fast forward to now, the guard who did the first aid, he is one of the guards out at William Head Institution, which is a very different type of prison. It's minimum security. It's on the coast of Vancouver Island.

There are seven private beaches. There's 100 men they live in in cottages. And he said, my wife and I, his wife is also a corrections officer, we're mom and dad to some of these guys, particularly to a wet. And he said he looks to us for guidance. He says, I would certainly support his bid to get out. Another guard testified that he thinks that if the jury was to determine that a wet could be released and it was to be at the guards street where he lives in Western Canada, he said, I'd have no problem with him.

A life coach. He testified that he had a checkered past himself before he was a life coach. He was convicted of some serious offenses. He's now a life coach in Western Canada. He's trying to give back. and he goes in to do a break the cycle program. He calls it in this William Head institution, this one on Vancouver Island. And he says that he's got a huge heart. He said, I met Awet.

We had a, I think it was an eight or 12-week program. He was very vulnerable opening up about himself. And he said, I would support him. And he said, I will support him if he is released on the outside. I'll keep in touch with him. Now, then there was an indigenous man who was an elder. He works in the prison. He comes in for three days a week and does sessions with the men.

They're trying to set them up for success. He said, I do a thing a few mornings a week where I get the men, the inmates, to write out letters or confessions to people. They don't send them to those people, but they write them as if their intention is to say, I'm sorry for what I did in my life. And then they ripped them up and they scatter them in the ocean. Then they do a cold plunge. And Elder Mawson said it's like a rebirth for these men. And so you've got all these people coming forward in his defense and support, some of them,

you know, some pretty tough prison guards. And then you've got Dr. Carmen Neufeld. She's a psychologist who did a review of his case about a year and a half ago. She said that he's at a moderate risk to reoffend. So she's not willing to say he's ready, but she says he's making progress. So my jaw, Julia, was basically dropping during the entire time. It was several days of testimony, one after the other. And I have to take something from that.

There has been a change in a wet aspect. Your job was dropping because... I was surprised that so many people would come forward. So many people who are members of the federal correction system would come forward. I mean, they were speaking honestly. And I think it's a really good thing. I felt actually proud as a Canadian that we allow people to come forward, even though their job is to keep these people in prison,

that they are allowed to speak honestly about what they're seeing. We'll be right back. You started by telling me he got his face slashed in a maximum security prison. And now he's at a beachside minimum security prison. He's been in prison for many years. All of these stories, what has Owett's journey been like, not just from maximum, medium to minimum, but what has he been doing with his time? All the guards testified that he's a hard worker.

He's got a forklift license. So there's a forklift at various prisons to bring in food and supplies. And so he's the guy, trusted inmate, who will move the... the forklift around. He's developed a real interest in the culinary arts. He's working towards a red seal designation, which shows that he will have done a number of hours. He'd like to be a good enough cook that he could run a food truck and give back to society, maybe introduce youths who, like himself, had a difficult upbringing, introduced them to the culinary arts as well. He's had some bumps on the road, absolutely. He has been caught with

steroids, which are banned substances in prison. There was some deceit about that. An SD memory card was found in his cell when he was at medium security. He got in a fight over a Super Bowl bet. And while he told his family that the other inmate hit him, when he testified, he said, no, that was a lie. He said, I punched him first. So there's just this thing about him. I talked to one of the homicide detectives who was there in court. And he said that, so he was a homicide detective involved in the original case. And he said the concern is that he's not able to moderate his reactivity. Something will happen that will set him off. And so that said, when the Crown attorney was cross-examining him after the defense lawyer was, you know, the friendly lawyer asking the questions of all of

a wet, when he testified and he was cross-examined, he kept his cool. He kept his cool. And the Crown Attorney is pretty sharp and she pushed him a lot. And so it does seem like he can moderate his behaviors. Now, that's in a controlled environment. In a courtroom, the concern in any of these cases is what happens when you get out on the streets, let's say, of Vancouver. Something's going to happen. Are you going to reoffend? You brought up him back in the courtroom. And I wanted to ask you about what did O'Wet have to say about his co-accused, Chris. Did he say anything? So let me just start with back in 2012, that afternoon, Sunday, hot afternoon in August, 2009,

there's the shooting. 2012, the trial, he testifies in 2012 that he's in a car with Chris, they're parked, and Chris tells him to get in the back seat. O'ette says he hears gunshots. He sees a scary man with braids running towards him, with a gun, gets in the car beside Chris, O'ets in the back, and he said they clearly knew each other. He believed there being a shooting, and he thought that they were involved in it together, and he's completely innocent. So now he's testified that he just made that up. So your question, which is a tough one for me to answer, what did he say about Chris now? When we get to what happened in the car, there is a ban on publication that we may be challenging

it's a ban that stops me from answering that question. I will tell you that I don't buy what he said based on everything I know about the case, but I have to, and the Toronto Star has to respect these publication bans until they're overturned, so I can't answer that question right now. Well, what is stunning, I mean, between the admission and then obviously the big question,

which is we have these correctional facilities to their function, at least one of the, their major functions is rehabilitation and how do you measure rehabilitation, right? Is he a rehabilitated man? Will he reoffend if he goes out? It's a difficult thing to answer. We're going to have our next episode with you, Kevin, and we're going to look more specifically at the Crown's cross-examination, the conflicting evidence regarding Owett's rehabilitation. You touched on it a little bit. We're going to talk about a little bit more. And the jury's ultimate decision. So we will also examine how these developments impact the ongoing legal efforts of Chris because he's part of this too.

So you can find the full investigation on the Toronto Stars podcast suspicion, Murder and Mount Olive, available on all major platforms. Please tune in for the next episode and thank you for listening. Murder on Mount Olive was written and narrated by me, Kevin Donovan. He was produced by Angeline Francis and Sean Pattenden. Our executive producer is J.P. Fosso. Additional production by Kelsey Wilson, Matt Hearn, and Tanya Pereira. Sound and theme music by Sean Patton.