Hamilton man who dumped Jason Gallant's body at Pier 4 Park guilty of 2nd-degree murder

A jury has found Michael Castiglione guilty of second-degree murder after he shot Jason Gallant in the head and dumped his body at a Hamilton park in April 2024.

During a two-week trial last month, Castiglione denied he had purposefully killed his acquaintance Gallant, 50, in a pickup truck, saying it was an accident.

The jury didn’t accept his version of events and reached a guilty verdict on Feb. 3. 

Castiglione will be sentenced later this year. While a second-degree murder charge carries a mandatory life sentence, Superior Court Justice Scott Latimer will decide when Castiglione is eligible for parole — after at least 10 years of imprisonment.

Before the jury decided the verdict, Latimer summarized what they’d heard throughout the trial.

On the night Gallant was killed, Castiglione was driving a borrowed orange pickup truck around the lower city with Gallant, his girlfriend at the time, Monica Wachzniuk, and another acquaintance, Shiloh Pettipas-Lizak, said Latimer. 

Wachzniuk told the jury she fell asleep in the truck’s front passenger seat and was awoken to Gallant punching her in the back of the head and ripping out a chunk of her hair.

“This understandably caused her pain and made her fearful of Jason,” said the judge. “He kept yelling at her and calling her a slut.” 

Castiglione didn’t intervene, Wachzniuk testified, and she told him to pull over. She got out of the truck near Burlington and Wentworth streets and began walking away.

Sitting in the back seat of the truck, Pettipas-Lizak testified he watched events unfold. Castiglione encouraged Gallant to move to the front seat, where Wachzniuk had been sitting. 

Castiglione then pulled out a rifle from under the back seat, walked to the front, driver’s side and pointed it at Gallant, Pettipas-Lizak told the court.

Pettipas-Lizak recalled Gallant then said to Castiglione, “What Mike, you’re going to shoot me?” 

Then he heard a bang. The passenger window behind Gallant shattered, and Pettipas-Lizak saw him slouch over, the court heard. There was blood “everywhere.” 

“Shiloh had blood and body fragments land on his glasses, which he had to wipe off,” Latimer said.