Birthday night turns fatal: Witnesses describe seconds before stabbing death

Dereck Szaflarski was twenty-seven years old, a personal fitness trainer in London, Ontario, and on the night of May 26, 2018, he was walking up Richmond Street with two women after a day spent celebrating his birthday. Within minutes, he would be dead on a sidewalk from a stab wound, killed in a confrontation that lasted only seconds—a fight that began when a driver objected to the three of them crossing the street.

Two women who were there that night testified at the Superior Court trial of Robert Ashley Williams, thirty-nine, who has pleaded not guilty to second-degree murder. Krystle Pereira, thirty-two, and Shawna Oag, twenty-eight, were the only witnesses to what happened in those final moments. Both carried the weight of it differently. Pereira had developed post-traumatic stress disorder after Szaflarski's death. Oag, who had known him longer, struggled to speak about it in court, her composure fracturing as she tried to recount the evening.

The night had been unremarkable until the very end. Pereira and Oag had gone to Molly Bloom's pub on Richmond Row around ten o'clock on May 25. Szaflarski arrived later, having been out celebrating since two in the afternoon at a bar and a house party. He joined the women at their table, bought them food and drinks, and the three of them moved on to Wink's, staying until closing time. Surveillance video from the bars showed them walking together afterward—Pereira ahead, Oag and Szaflarski with their arms around each other. They were heading to Pereira's car, parked on Piccadilly Street. Instead of walking north to the traffic lights at Oxford Street, they decided to cross Richmond Street at the intersection where they were.

Pereira stepped into the road first, thinking she had time. A white car sped toward her. As she passed it, the driver—Williams—yelled something derogatory out his open window. Szaflarski responded, telling him to keep driving. Williams stopped the car and got out onto the west sidewalk, taking a fighting stance, his fist clenched. Pereira could see something in his left hand. Oag tried to pull Szaflarski toward the east sidewalk, but he turned and charged at Williams instead, crashing into a storefront vestibule. The fight was over almost before it began. "It all just happened so fast," Pereira told the jury.

The surveillance video showed Williams in a black shirt before the altercation and shirtless afterward, his shirt in his hand. Pereira could not see exactly how the violence unfolded—she heard only muffled sounds. Szaflarski walked back across Richmond toward the women, adjusted his shirt, and then collapsed. Blood was spurting from him. Pereira called 911 while Oag pressed her hands against his wound, trying to stop the bleeding. An ambulance took him to the hospital. An hour later, the women learned he was dead.

Oag's testimony was quieter, more fragmented. She remembered nothing unusual about the hours they had spent together at the bars. She felt scared as the fight was about to start. She saw a weapon, though she could describe it only vaguely. "It happened really fast," she said. "Before I knew it it was already over." She remembered Szaflarski walking back across the street slowly, blood on the ground beneath him. When he collapsed, she tried to help him. "There was nothing I could do," she said.

The trial continues. Williams remains charged with second-degree murder. What began as a birthday celebration—a young man out with friends, buying rounds, enjoying the night—ended in seconds on a sidewalk, the kind of sudden violence that leaves witnesses forever changed, forever trying to explain how something so brief could be so final.