Savanna Pikuyak’s Facebook images found in Ibey’s computer, trial hears

More than 100 images from Savanna Pikuyak’s Facebook page, including some duplicates, were found stored in the computer cache of the man accused of killing her, an Ottawa court was told Monday.

The Crown called its last witness Monday in the first-degree murder trial of 35-year-old Nikolas Ibey, which opened Nov. 12. Defence lawyers are expected to start calling witnesses Tuesday.

Ibey is charged in the Sept. 11, 2022, strangulation death of Pikuyak, 22. She had moved to Ottawa less than a week before from Sanirajak and was renting a room at Ibey’s house while she studied nursing at Algonquin College.

Sgt. Marc Desjardins, a supervisor at the digital forensic service section of the Ottawa Police Service, reviewed images found in the cache of Ibey’s web browser.

He said that on the day Pikuyak died, starting at around 2:25 a.m., Ibey spent four minutes repeatedly going through dozens of photos on the victim’s Facebook profile.

Crown prosecutor Michael Purcell questioned Desjardins about the approximately 105 copies of images from Pikuyak’s Facebook page that were found in Ibey’s browser cache.

When a web browser downloads an image, it stores it in the browser’s cache so that if a user returns to the same web page the browser doesn’t have to download the image again.

Earlier in the trial, police testimony revealed Ibey spent seven hours contacting 30 different escorts looking for sex on the night Pikuyak died. Ibey’s last web search for escorts was at about 3:08 a.m., the jury heard Friday.

In the police investigation, Desjardins reviewed images in the cache from 7 p.m. on Sept. 10 until 11 a.m. the following morning.

In all, there were 2,000 instances of images in Ibey’s web browser cache.

“In your review of those 2,000 or so images from the cache during that time frame, did those other images appear to depict any other women, as much as they did Ms. Pikuyak?” Purcell asked.

There were other women, Desjardins said, “but I do not remember there being any significant representation of any female other than that of Savanna Pikuyak.”

Images in Ibey’s computer cache included photos of Pikuyak alone but also of her with other people as well as shots showing landscapes and food, Desjardins said under cross-examination by defence lawyer Ewan Lyttle.

Lyttle suggested fewer than half were pictures of Pikuyak alone, which Desjardins confirmed.

Lyttle also pointed out that during the same period, Ibey had been looking at photos of other people besides Pikuyak, as well as various memes.