Jurors at the Michael Ball murder trial heard Wednesday from a man who claimed he helped Ball dump Erin Howlett’s body into the Grand River.

“Erin Howlett was killed,” Daniel Warwick told the court shortly after taking the witness stand.

“Michael Ball did it.”

Warwick, who was recently released from jail after being sentenced to a stint there for dealing drugs, was friends with Ball at the time of Howlett’s death. The two were also connected through the drug world.

The 26-year-old’s testimony centred on the night of June 27, 2013.

Jurors have heard from several people who saw Howlett earlier that day, but none who knew of her whereabouts by the evening hours.

That, Warwick says, is because she was dead by that point.

He told jurors that Ball picked him up that night, and drove him to his basement apartment on Chestnut Street in Kitchener.

“I waited at the top of the stairs because Michael Ball told me to,” he said.

He continued, saying that Ball asked him to get a duffel bag and gloves from under the staircase and bring them to the bedroom, where Ball told him to hold the bag open “so he could pull the body into it.”

After that, Warwick testified, he and Ball placed the duffel bag in the truck of a car Ball had borrowed, then drove to the Grand River.

He then described how the two allegedly put rocks in the bag to weigh in down, and then disposed of the remains.

“We threw her body over the left side of the wall into the river,” he said.

According to Warwick, the two then returned to Ball’s apartment to cut a mattress into pieces, as it had been stained by Howlett’s blood.

He said that they put pieces of the mattress into garbage bags, and then left the bags outside different homes on Union Street, which was due for garbage pickup the following day.

The Crown asked Warwick what thoughts were going through his mind as these events transpired.

“Why did this happen?” he responded.

“Why am I here? What do I have to do with this?”

Warwick said that Ball told him he killed Howlett by choking her, because he was mad about a photo of another man's private part he saw on her phone.

The bag was discovered eight days later, by a group of teenagers swimming in the area.

Warwick’s testimony continues Thursday.