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When the plastic container came to her, the short-haired juror in the front row couldn't get rid of it fast enough.

The container, which made a pill-bottle sound as she passed it along, wincing, in a Toronto courtroom yesterday, held a brass bullet casing. It was found, court was told, on the Yonge Street sidewalk 14 metres south of where John O'Keefe fell dead at 1:17 a.m. on Jan. 12, 2008.

Shot in the head from behind as he walked, the 42-year-old father never saw it coming. He simply dropped, along with the knapsack and blender he'd been carrying in a box.

Over the next few weeks, the short-haired juror, along with three other women and eight men, will weigh these and other details as they decide whether Edward Paredes, 24, and his friend Awet Zekarias, 25, are guilty of second-degree murder in Mr. O'Keefe's death.

The two men have pleaded not guilty, and the Crown has rejected an offer from Mr. Paredes to plead guilty to manslaughter, jurors heard.

The Crown will argue that Mr. Paredes carried his semi-automatic Baby Desert Eagle pistol, clipped to the waistband of his pants and hidden beneath his coat, into the Brass Rail strip club on Yonge Street that night, where they celebrated Mr. Zekarias's birthday.

When their behaviour prompted two bar staff to remove them, prosecutor Hank Goody said, Mr. Zekarias voiced a threat to shoot one of them on the way out, though it was Mr. Paredes who had the gun.

Once the two were outside, Mr. Paredes began walking south away from the bar, the prosecutor told jurors, but Mr. Zekarias followed along and egged him on, urging him to use his "gat" (urban slang for gun), to go back and "smoke the fools," to give him the gun so he could do the job himself.

The two men stopped to turn around when a man called to them from the direction of the bar. It was the Brass Rail's head doorman, saying he'd found a cellphone and thought it was one of theirs, the prosecutor said. The pair headed back north with Mr. Zekarias still urging Mr. Paredes to give him the gun, Mr. Goody said, but instead, Mr. Paredes pulled the slide, ejecting the round he'd just loaded and installing a new one.

"And this time, Mr. Paredes did not then put the gun back into his clothing," Mr. Goody said, but pointed it at the doorman and the Brass Rail manager, who was also outside.

When the doorman heard the click-click sound of the gun's slide and saw it rise in his direction, "He yelled out 'Gun! Gun!' " the prosecutor said, a cry which sent bar workers scrambling back inside and bystanders scattering - except Mr. O'Keefe, who kept walking, oblivious to the gunman behind him.

"When John O'Keefe abruptly falls down dead onto the sidewalk in front of the Brass Rail," Mr. Goody said, "it is because Edward Paredes, at the repeated urging of Awet Zekarias, pointed and fired a loaded gun into the space where the Brass Rail staff members were just standing ..."

Police arrested the two men separately later that day.

On the sidewalk, police found the empty bullet casing about three metres from an intact, unfired round.

Jurors passed both around in their plastic jars yesterday.

Mr. Goody told them that, cliché as it might be, Mr. O'Keefe was "in the wrong place at the wrong time."

Outside court, the dead man's long-time friend, Chris McDonald, begged to differ. If anyone was in the wrong place, he said, it wasn't Mr. O'Keefe.

"John had every right to be walking up Yonge Street at the time," Mr. McDonald said. "He was in no way in any wrong."

The trial continues today.