It was extremely unusual: On the eve of trial, with the jury already chosen, Nader Hasan held a news conference.
Speaking directly to the public outside the downtown Toronto courthouse on a cold mid-March day, the defence lawyer asked Torontonians to keep an open mind about his client, a man many expected to be revealed a monster and deliberate "cop killer," as alleged by the Crown.
"I promise in due time, the truth will emerge," Hasan said.
And he was right.
The trial of Umar Zameer in the tragic, accidental death Const. Jeffrey Northrup in a parking garage beneath Nathan Phillips Square captured the city this month unlike any other in recent Toronto history, with the outcome still reverberating through the courts and the city's police service.
Behind it all was Nader Hasan, a 45-year-old lawyer who before this year was best known for pioneering novel legal arguments before the Ontario Court of Appeal or the Supreme Court of Canada-certainly not as a go-to name to pull off the year's most sensational criminal defence.
The rise of Nader Hasan
The son of a Bangladeshi father and Norwegian mother who met in England before immigrating to Canada, Hasan grew up in Oakville.
At White Oaks Secondary School, he remembers he wanted to be a basketball player, "but my grades were better than my jump shot," he smiles during an interview from his downtown office on the 41st floor.
His dad was a chartered accountant who started his own company importing clothes from Bangladesh. It wasn't hugely successful but it enabled the family to live a comfortable, middle-class lifestyle. ("Like many immigrant parents, they made tremendous sacrifices so that my brother and I could pursue our dreams," Hasan wrote in an email a day after he spoke to the Star, concerned he hadn't given them enough credit.)
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