A mistrial was declared Friday in the case of Mohammed Javed.
Javed had been on trial in Florida for a charge of second-degree murder in the death of his wife, 26-year-old Susan Vicars, a Harriston native.
A tentative retrial has been scheduled for Sept. 13. Javed will remain in custody until then.
Javed reported Vicars missing in February 2008. Two months later, her remains were found in a wooded area near Lehigh Acres, Fla., where she was living at the time.
Javed was arrested shortly after that.
Court has undergone two weeks of testimony, and the mistrial was declared based on questions and answers with one of the witnesses. Javed’s attorney, David Brener, requested the mistrial after he repeatedly objected to a line of questioning which he claimed violated Javed’s rights and could sway the jurors’ decision.
“The jury could really come to the conclusion that the defendant didn’t satisfactorily answer while others (witnesses) did, and therefore he’s guilty,” Brener said after the hearing. “I had no choice but to ask for the mistrial.”
On Wednesday, key witness Thomas Parker testified he saw Vicars’ dead body in Javed’s house. He testified Javed called him Feb. 5 and told him “she’s dead.”
When Parker arrived at the house, he said he saw Vicars’ body wrapped in a comforter, a hole in the wall, and blood was on the wall.
Parker said he and Javed argued, then Parker agreed to help move her body to the garage, into the trunk of Javed’s car, and subsequently to the wooded area where her body was later found.
Detectives investigating the case said Vicars died of blunt force trauma to the head.
Javed said he hit her four times in the back of the head with a log, Parker testified.
Two months later, Parker spoke with investigators and was arrested after he confessed. He is charged with accessory after the fact.
Javed had planned to travel to Canada, then return home to his native Pakistan, said Parker.
Javed was arrested in April 2008 while on a bus headed for Canada, shortly after Vicars’ body was found. Police report he’d left his home in the middle of the night and was removed from the bus in Buffalo, N.Y.
When Javed originally reported his wife missing, he told police she’d met a man online and had left to meet him. Vicars grew up in the Harriston area, and attended high school in Palmerston and Mount Forest. She lived in Kitchener for a while with Javed, whom she met online, before moving to the United States to live with him there. She converted to Muslim for Javed and the two had a son and a daughter.
- With files from The Record