ST. JOHN’S, NL – Brittany Cochrane was driving home from work about 5 PM. It was Feb. 7, 2023, and snow was on the ground along Mayor Avenue. The 32-year-old woman saw two young men fighting near the intersection with Newtown Road. According to another witness, the two men “were pounding the shit out of each other.”
Brittany Cochrane told the jury in Courtroom #4 of the Supreme Court she screamed, “I’m calling 911.” She said the man wearing a dark hoodie “took off” towards Newtown Road.
She said the other man, Seamus Secord took a few steps, and said, “I’ve been stabbed,” while pulling up his T-shirt and holding it against one of his wounds.
By chance, an RNC officer and a paramedic, part of the RNC Mobile Incident Response Team, drove by. Constable Clair Downton saw blood on the snow and a man who she described as being “in distress.”
By the time Downton got to Secord, he had staggered into the garage below his apartment and was lying on the floor.
Cochrane, the first witness in the murder trial of Robert Belbin, told the court she was kneeling beside Secord and trying to stop the bleeding from one of his chest wounds. She told the quiet courtroom Secord said, “Please tell my mom I love her.”
In the gallery of Courtroom #4, Secord’s mother gasped. The room was still for a moment, except for the sound of Cynthia Buchan’s weeping.
Thirteen days later, Buchan finally heard Belbin admit what she believed from the moment she heard her son died: Belbin, 23, killed her son. According to the medical examiner, Secord died after sustaining 10 wounds, two of them lethal stabs that pierced his heart, lung, and jugular vein.
The Who and The What
After the fight? Belbin admitted he was the man appearing in several homeowner cameras, running from the crime scene in a dark, hooded coat, moving west on Newtown Road, through Rabbittown.
Before the fight? The jury heard from a witness who was at Secord’s Mayor Avenue apartment before the fight. Andrew Fleming said both he and Belbin had gone to Secord’s to help him look for some missing drugs. Secord, a drug dealer, had lost track of 3,000 Dilaudid pills.
Dilaudid is an opioid, like morphine or oxycodone or fentanyl. Belbin told the court the street price for “D” is $10 a pill, making Secord’s missing pills a potential $30,000 problem.
The police also found $16,610 in cash and 89 grams of cocaine in Secord’s apartment, drugs with a street value of around $9,000. To put that in perspective the RCMP seized $147,000 in cash and 20.5 kilograms of cocaine with a street value $1.6 million in their 2024 Project Bourbon bust.
Fleming, a very nervous 23-year-old witness, testified that Secord and Belbin were “close friends,” but on this day were in a heated argument. Fleming, who admitted he also dealt drugs at the time, described Secord as “really out of it.”
The argument, according to Fleming, became a screaming match. Secord believed Belbin was responsible for the missing drugs. Fleming said Secord was “furious” and “went into a rage.”
Belbin, Fleming said, told Secord, “I’m sick of this shit,” and left the Mayor Avenue apartment.
Secord apparently wasn’t finished. He sent his best friend a text message: “Don’t talk to me ever again. You fucking loser,” he wrote. Still not finished, in a follow-up cell phone call Belbin said Secord threatened to “shoot up” the apartment where Belbin was staying.
At that point, Belbin made a decision that led to the prisoner’s box in Courtroom #4. He headed back to Secord’s apartment on Mayor Avenue.
According to Fleming, Secord left the apartment following the phone call. The fight lasted barely more than a minute and the next time Fleming saw Secord, he was staggering back towards his Mayor Avenue apartment. It would only be a matter of a few more minutes before Secord had no pulse and was unresponsive.
The Why
When Belbin testified, he said he stabbed Secord in self-defence.
Belbin said he was going down Mayor Avenue when he met Secord coming up the hill. He said Secord had a knife in his hand and “was going to stab me.” There was a struggle. The two young men fell to the ground. Belbin said he gained control of the knife. He said Secord was grabbing on to his coat and wouldn’t let go.
Then Belbin said he heard a woman screaming. She said she was calling the police. Belbin got up and ran towards Newtown Road. Asked what he did with the knife, Belbin said he “flipped it on Salisbury Street” when he “realized I still had it.”
Belbin was calm, almost to the point of being stoic, as he testified. He said when he ran from the fight scene, Secord was walking back towards his apartment. He said he didn’t know one of his best friends was dying.
In an effort to prove Belbin had a reason to fear Secord, defence lawyer Jason Edwards entered Secord’s criminal record and video of an August 2022 incident on George Street where Secord stabbed a man.
Belbin said he was with Secord when he chased a man down a road, armed with a sawed-off shotgun. Asked how he knew this happened, Belbin replied, “I was in the back seat.”
Belbin testified that on another occasion he saw Secord attack a man with a mini-bat, and on another occasion drive his pickup truck up on a sidewalk and try to run down a man.
Asked if Secord would sometimes pull a knife to frighten people, Robert Belbin said, “Yes.” Guns? “Sometimes… yes,” Belbin replied.
Belbin’s defence is that he had reason to be afraid of what an enraged Secord would do. Under cross-examination by Crown Counsel Paul Thistle, Belbin said, “I didn’t mean for that to happen. I didn’t want that to happen.”
The young man is facing years in prison if the jury doesn’t believe him.
The Back Story
How did the lives of these two young men, best of friends, lead to a pool of blood on the snow in Rabbittown on a cold February day in St. John’s, 2023?
Secord and Belbin were both raised by single mothers. They both had tumultuous childhoods. Neither finished high school. Secord was in and out of group homes. When Belbin was 16, a social worker decided it was better for him to live on his own rather than with his mother. His mother says he was put in an apartment with no follow-up or supervision.
Both boys found themselves in juvenile court and eventually in the juvenile detention centre in Whitbourne.
By the time Secord was in Grade 9, he had found trouble. Still, there were moments when life seemed good, like the summer he worked at the
Mt. Carmel Building Supply Company on Salmonier Line. A woman who worked with Seamus described him as “a nice kid.” Like a normal teenager, Seamus saved his money and bought a quad.
Unfortunately, Secord’s life wasn’t normal. He was living in a group home in 2016. Over the next four years, he was charged with assault, assaulting a police officer, uttering threats, public mischief and carrying a weapon in a motor vehicle. Mixed throughout his criminal record, are charges of breaching release orders and undertakings.
Over the course of several conversations before the trial Buchan said whenever her son got into trouble, she wondered how Belbin was involved. She said when the police contacted her to say Secord had been killed, she immediately suspected Belbin was involved. Why? “Mother’s intuition,” she said.
The New Normal
In September 2023, The Shoreline published a column titled Farewell Innocence, following Belbin’s conviction for a 2022 assault on George Street. The Victoria Day weekend assault seemed to trigger a series of drive-by shootings, and the 2023 column recalled a time before RNC “shelter in place” warnings began to feel normal.
There used to be a time when gunfire on the streets of St. John’s was rare. It was so rare that, up until 1998, RNC officers did not carry sidearms. They had firearms in the trunks of their patrol vehicles, but they needed the permission of a superior officer before they could take them out.
Now, uniformed RNC officers wear sidearms even in the safest of places, like Courtroom #4 of the Supreme Court.
Back in the 1970s and ’80s, people downtown and in Georgetown and Rabbittown tended to know their neighbours. It might be noisy on the street sometimes when the neighbourhood pub closed, but nobody was picking up needles on the sidewalk the next day. There was a time when street drugs meant marijuana. Now street drugs mean Dilaudid, Percocet, and fentanyl.
Murder remains a rare event in St. John’s. The average per year only moved above two in the 1990s and is still below three, with the rate in the 2020s actually a little lower than the 2010s.
But the surrounding indicators paint a different picture. Deaths from drug overdoses, across the entire province, have marched upwards for years, from 11 in 2000, 28 in 2010, 45 in 2020 and 83 last year.
Concerns about crime rose high enough for the provincial government to create a “crime dashboard” in June, showing all manner of crimes climbing over the past five years, with a particular rise in 2024.
There was a time. There was a time. There was a time, but those days are gone, gone, gone.
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Editor’s Note – The jury in the Robert Belbin trial was still deliberating when the deadline came. The jury eventually found Robert Belbin guilty of second degree murder.
This story was first published in the October 23 edition of The Shoreline News
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