A North Vancouver man has been found guilty of second-degree murder in the stabbing death of his partner.
On Dec. 19, 2021, Everton Javaun Downey and Melissa Blimkie drove from their North Vancouver apartment to Metrotown in Burnaby. While walking through the mall’s stairwell, Downey stabbed the 25-year-old 15 times with a folding knife, hitting her left lung, heart, liver, left kidney as well as her arms, hands and thighs.
He was later charged with second-degree murder and faced trial in Vancouver in B.C. Supreme Court between January 2024 and June 2025.
Downey never denied that he stabbed his girlfriend to death, but his defence counsel argued he should be found not criminally responsible by reason of mental disorder, or that he lacked the specific intent required under the law for a conviction for second-degree murder.
At trial, Downey testified about a series of “strange” incidents causing him paranoia – people following him or monitoring him through holes in the ceiling, someone talking to Blimkie through her ear, and strangers throwing an intoxicating powder on him that would cause him to lose control of his actions.
A few days before the murder, Downey claimed to see Blimkie putting powder into his drink. He testified he believed she was trying to kill him and that he struck her in the face.
In the moments leading up to the fatal stabbing, Downey said Blimkie herself “reached into her waistband and threw powder into his face.”
“The effects were worse than when other people had thrown powder at him. This time, Mr. Downey ‘kinda blacked out’ and ‘basically lost it,’” Justice Heather Holmes summarized in her Aug. 21 written ruling. “Mr. Downey testified that he heard voices saying, ‘she’s going to set you up, she’s gonna kill you.’ He remembered little else except that he was not able to control himself.”
After the stabbing, Downey climbed into a stranger’s car and asked to be driven somewhere but she refused. He then walked through the surrounding residential areas, letting himself into people’s homes, asking them for help and telling them that someone was trying to kill him. He stashed his knife and swapped out his bloody clothes with some found in an apartment’s laundry room. He also threw away the pouch he used for his drug business that contained cocaine, a stack of money, and his encrypted phone.
He was eventually taken into custody where he appeared anxious and agitated, telling officers he couldn’t breathe, that his back was causing him extreme pain and that he was about to die. He was eventually taken to hospital but returned to police cells later that night.
After he was released from custody the next day, Downey took the bus to Brentwood where he robbed a bank for $112 in coins.
He was arrested again a few days later when he approached Richmond RCMP members in a parking lot, telling them he wanted to turn himself in.
B.C. Supreme Court judge reject's testimony
In reaching her verdict, Holmes said she did not believe Downey’s account of his perception and state of mind surrounding the offence. She said Downey was an unreliable witness who had a profound difficulty maintaining a coherent accounting of the sequence of events and, she noted, he had a history of lying “to serve his own purposes.”
Holmes also rejected any assertion that Downey’s ADHD, PTSD, anxiety, paranoia or cannabis use had interfered with his ability to know right from wrong.
“The evidence of Mr. Downey’s post-offence conduct provides compelling evidence that he was thinking clearly and taking deliberate and, in its context, rational action,” she wrote.
Considering the whole of the evidence, Holmes said there was no reasonable doubt about Downey’s intent.
“To stab Ms. Blimkie, Mr. Downey had to remove the folding knife from his pocket and open it to extend the blade. He stabbed Ms. Blimkie a full 15 times. This was a purposeful and sustained attack. Mr. Downey also fled the scene immediately, leaving Ms. Blimkie alone in a stairwell. He did nothing to assist her, and he made no effort to enlist others to do so,” she wrote. “The only reasonable inference from these facts is that Mr. Downey intended to kill Ms. Blimkie, or at least to cause her serious bodily harm that he knew was likely to cause her death, without caring whether she died or not.”
Downey is due back in court on Sept. 3.
