Former officer Beau Lamarre-Condon has alleged he heard homophobic abuse when working for New South Wales police, as the 31-year-old gave evidence in his double murder trial in Sydney. Lamarre-Condon is accused of fatally shooting couple Jesse Baird and Luke Davies with his police service weapon in Baird’s Paddington home on 19 February 2024. He has pleaded not guilty to two counts of murder and one charge of aggravated break and enter.
Lamarre-Condon on Thursday started giving evidence at the NSW supreme court in front of a 15-person jury. He was the first witness for the defence. Wearing a light grey suit, a dark coloured tie and a white collared shirt, Lamarre-Condon vowed to tell the truth.
He accused a former supervisor of making homophobic remarks while he was working as an openly gay police officer. On one occasion, when responding to a domestic violence report, the supervisor allegedly said “Let’s go get these fucking faggots”, the jury was told. Prosecution lawyers wrapped up their case earlier on Thursday morning.
They called more than 50 witnesses, played hours of CCTV footage and shared pages of social media messages over the first seven weeks of the trial. Lamarre-Condon’s defence team has previously claimed Baird and Davies were accidentally shot in two separate struggles with the accused when he was acting in “self-defence”. The officer cleaned up the scene and disposed of the bodies afterwards because he “panicked considerably”, the defence lawyer John Stratton SC previously said.
The trial before Justice Natalie Adams continues.
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