Mother of 23-Year-Old Victim Testifies in Bakdash Murder Trial

Timothy Bakdash, the Roseville-native who fatally struck 23-year-old University of Minnesota senior Benjamin Van Handel with his car last April, stared down at his hands and papers Monday morning, glancing up just once, as the prosecution’s first witness, Van Handel’s mother, Ann, spoke in Hennepin County Court during the .

Bakdash is facing one count of first-degree murder and two counts of attempted murder in the first degree. In addition to Van Handel’s mother, Leslie Falk, a friend of Van Handel who saw him hit, and Sarah Bagley, a University of Minnesota student injured in the incident, also testified Monday morning. The courtroom was full, with many family and friends of victims in attendance.

On April 15 last year, Bakdash was drinking at the Library Bar in Dinkytown when he started arguing with some other patrons, according to the charges. After he left the bar, he allegedly drove his Mitsubishi Galant into a group of pedestrians with whom he thought he had argued.  

“This is not a case of drunk driving. This is a case of murder,” assistant Hennepin County prosecutor Christina Warren told a jury during her opening statement, according to the Pioneer Press. “He thought he was killing the man who had disrespected him.”

Bakdash’s defense will be that the accident was without intent or premeditation, that the police failed to fully investigate the incident and that some of the prosecution’s witnesses are “trying to save their skin,” defense attorney Joe Tamburino argued in his opening statement, according to the Pioneer Press.

Bakdash will testify later in the trial as the defense’s first witness.

“He will tell you he didn't see them, and he will tell you there is absolutely no way that he intended to hurt them,” Tamburino said.

Ann Van Handel described her son as “kind, generous,” as someone “always willing to be the friend” and “the spark of our family” and recalled getting a phone call from her husband early in the morning of April 15 while she was visiting her sister in South Carolina.

“It was the call every parent dreads,” Van Handel said. “He told me that he was hit and was in critical condition.”

Van Handel flew back to Minnesota and arrived at her son’s side by 10 a.m., finding him unconscious, scraped up and intubated with blood still on his head.

After six days in the hospital, during which Benjamin Van Handel suffered several strokes, his neurological team told his family that he had zero chance of regaining consciousness. His family decided to cut off life support, and Van Handel died soon afterward.

A very close friend

The prosecution’s second witness was Leslie Falk, who was walking alone with Van Handel the two-and-a-half blocks from Blarney’s, a Dinkytown bar, to their duplex, where they lived in separate units.

(Van Handel’s mother said her son believed no girl should walk home alone. “He walked girls home in high heels in ice storms so they wouldn’t fall,” she said.)

Falk said that they were on a sidewalk on the north side of 5th Street when she heard a sound of acceleration, of a revving engine at her back. She said she turned to see a car with parking lamps turned on traveling toward her at 25 to 30 miles per hour.

She said she stepped up onto a grassy hill and tried to yank Van Handel toward her, making contact with his arm but failing to gain purchase as the motion of the car pulled him away.

“He got stuck on the [hood], his head facing upwards like he was sitting on it almost,” she said.

Falk said she then heard the sound of a car accelerating and Van Handel was taken westward toward 12th Avenue.

“He flew off the hood of the car and then hit the telephone pole in the corner and then landed in the street,” she said, voice breaking and eyes welling as she identified the dent caused by Van Handel’s head in a photograph of the telephone pole.

“I hadn’t known Ben terribly long—about a year—but the reason he had come out was because I asked him to,” she said. “He had become a very close friend in the last few weeks.”

Falk, who now lives near Grand Avenue in St. Paul, said she no longer goes to Dinkytown.

Particles of tooth

Sarah Bagley, the prosecution’s third witness, was drinking in Dinkytown on April 14 to celebrate her acceptance into the University of Oregon’s graduate architecture program.

She said she didn’t know either Bakdash or Van Handel.

She said she remembered walking on the north side of 5th Street and hearing the sound of a car accelerating, “as if someone were to put their foot all the way to the ground.”

Her next memory, she said, was of waking up with her head throbbing, particles of tooth in her mouth, blood on her clothing, elbow lacerated, left leg immobile and the sound of ambulance sirens growing louder.

“I don’t have any memory between the sound of an engine revving and waking up on the ground,” she said.

Bagley tore her patella, lost part of her knee cap, underwent several surgeries and continues to see an orthopedist.

Bakdash’s trial continues Tuesday at 9 a.m. in front of Judge Daniel Mabley and is expected to last about a week.