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Father tells jury his son confessed to murder

Derek Spalding, centre, denies killing Shaki Crockwell.

The father of murder-accused Derek Spalding told a jury his son confessed to the crime and asked him to be his alibi.The man told his son’s Supreme Court trial he reported this to police after he became scared his son would kill him too.He cannot be named by the media due to a reporting restriction imposed by the judge at the request of the prosecution.Yesterday, he told the jury Mr Spalding went on a sailing trip in 2007, shortly after being released from prison.“He brought back guns off the ship and some weed,” he alleged. “He asked me if I had a safe place to keep them. I told him I had no place to keep them.”He said his son spoke of bringing back three guns and showed him two.He went on to testify that his son told him the day after Mr Crockwell’s death that he killed him because he owed him money for drugs. “He took him out. That’s what he told me,” he alleged.“He told me I needed to do something for him. He needed me to be an alibi for him.”Mr Crockwell, 25, was shot in the back of the head on the Railway Trail in Devonshire on the night of August 24 2007. He was found by a passer-by lying in a pool of blood, wearing a bulletproof vest under his hooded sweatshirt (see second story.)Prosecutors say Mr Crockwell was murdered by Mr Spalding, 36, over a drug debt.The father said he “felt so bad” about what his son told him of the murder and “I was thinking about it all the time.” However, he did not tell police at first because he was scared of his son. He told the jury his son used to bring gangsters to the place where he worked, and he heard him instructing the gangsters about men he wanted to kill.The father said he and his son argued when he told him not to bring the gangsters to his workplace again. In August 2011, he became scared his son was going to kill him after an argument about that topic.“He told me ‘I could kill you right now. Right now, I could kill you.’ I was hurt when he told me that,” he said.He alleged that his son was “right up in my face like he wanted to kiss my lips,” and behaving “like he had some demon in him”.This, he said, was why he went to a police station to make a report about the murder.“I just thought the police ought to know about him. I just told them everything,” he explained.Defence lawyer Mark Pettingill suggested the man was a bad father and a bad husband. He further suggested that his son did not trust him, and did not make any confession to him.The father denied that.He agreed with Mr Pettingill’s suggestion that he served time in jail in his home country in 1995 or 1996 in relation to a gun offence. However, he said he had been “framed” by his pregnant “babymother” who falsely accused him of “shooting up the place” after he got another woman pregnant too.He agreed with Mr Pettingill that he has many children by different women, but protested: “I like girls. I never killed anybody.”Mr Spalding denies charges of premeditated murder and using a firearm to commit that crime and the case continues.