Accused murderer Shaylin Sutherland-Kayseas told a Saskatoon police officer she shot and killed 26-year old Dylan Phillips while trying to rob him.
She told the officer she didn’t plan on killing him or mean to kill him in a taped police interview in March 2017 – about five months after Phillips died.
Sutherland-Kayseas, 20, said she didn’t know Phillips but knew he dealt marijuana and needed money. She told Det. Sgt. Corey Lenius the shooting happened in a scuffle when she went to Phillips’s home on the 1400 block of Avenue G North.
She loaded a gun before going into the home, she told Lenius. She said she asked where the drugs are and pointed a gun at Phillips. Phillips grabbed the gun, she pulled the trigger and a fight broke out, according to Sutherland-Kayseas.
“It all happened too fast,” she said in the warned statement to Lenius, adding it was “either him or us.”
At the beginning of the interview, which was played in court Thursday during day four of her first-degree murder trial, Sutherland-Kayseas appeared to be in good spirits and joked and talked rather openly with Lenius.
She told Lenius she was a bubbly person with a big heart who could never hurt anyone. When asked if she killed Philips she said no, and that she doesn’t know him.
After a couple of hours she was brought to another room where Det. Sgt. Kyla Hicks outlined some evidence against her, including phone calls from jail in which she discusses the murder, DNA, and a statement from a woman claiming Sutherland-Kayseas bragged about killing someone.
Sutherland-Kayseas was left alone in an interview room where she put her hands in her head and swore. Lenius questioned her more about the murder and asked if she was lying when she told him she had a big heart. After some silence she eventually confessed.
“OK, I shot him,” she said. “I shot him dead. No one else had anything to do with it.”
She was with Trent Southwind and a youth, both who have pleaded guilty to manslaughter in Phillips’s death, but told Lenius she was supposed to drop them off and planned to go to Phillips’s home alone.
“It just went wrong,” she said. “I never planned to kill somebody.”
Sutherland-Kayseas is charged with first-degree murder, committing murder for the benefit of the Terror Squad gang and the assault on Phillips’s parents. Court heard his parents witnessed the murder.
Earlier in the interview, Lenius asked Sutherland-Kayseas about her gang affiliation to which she eventually said she is no longer in the Terror Squad. She said while she’s no longer a part of the gang, they are like her family.
“It’s how I grew up,” she said.
Lenius pointed to a tattoo on her wrist and hand that reads “TS” and said he heard she’s a respected member of the gang.
Sutherland-Kayseas told Lenius she first snorted meth when she was a teenager after her father died and that her mother was incarcerated for periods while she was growing up.
She lived in different cities in Canada before coming back to Saskatoon to be with her family and dropped out of school in Grade 9, court heard.
She expressed the importance of her siblings in her life and said her most proud moment is when she received her first paycheck, but quit her job shortly after.
