Karen Megeney clutched her husband Dexter’s hand as she listened to emotionally charged testimony on the first few moments that followed her son being shot in the chest by a fellow soldier in Kandahar, Afghanistan.
Master Cpl. Matthew McKay heard the gunshot blast and his instincts told him it sounded like a 9-millimetre Browning pistol, he told lead prosecutor Lt. Cmdr. Robert Fetterly during questioning Friday afternoon, the second day of the Cpl. Matthew Wilcox court martial at Victoria Park in Sydney.
The tent had the smell of gunpowder, he said. At the back section of the tent he found Cpl. Kevin Megeney, bloodied and slumping to the ground. Wilcox had grabbed Megeney’s right shoulder and tried to prop his head up.
“Come on, Kev. Come on, Kev. I’m sorry,” McKay remembered Wilcox repeatedly saying to his friend, Megeney.
McKay said he propped Megeney’s legs up and started talking to him, trying to keep him from going into shock while other soldiers looked for an exit wound.
“I was just talking to him the best I could,” he said. “He was weak and couldn’t talk.” Megeney stopped breathing a short time later.
Cardiopulmonary resuscitation was performed unsuccessfully and an American combat lifesaver arrived on the scene and told the young men Megeney had to be rushed to the hospital, or “he’s not going to make it,” McKay said.
Wilcox, 23, a member of the 2nd Battalion of the Nova Scotia Highlanders, is charged with manslaughter, criminal negligence causing death and negligent performance of duty in Megeney’s death on March 6, 2007.
Wilcox of Glace Bay and Megeney of Stellarton, Pictou County, were alone in a tent on the Kandahar airfield base when Megeney was shot.
In testimony Thursday, Master Cpl. Kyle Keigan said Wilcox told him the two were playing “quick draw,” a game to see which soldier could pull their gun faster from the holster into a firing position.
