Gang shootings vex Vancouver police and officials

Published 10:40 pm Sunday, February 8, 2009

VANCOUVER, B.C. — Another spasm of gang violence in the metropolitan area has residents worrying once again whether the city is becoming a free-fire zone.

On Friday afternoon, two gunmen pumped multiple rounds from what Royal Canadian Mounted Police say were prohibited firearms into a pickup truck outside a supermarket at a suburban mall in Langley filled with shoppers.

The victim, who police say has organized-crime links, was badly wounded and clinging to life.

Three days earlier, on Tuesday afternoon, Raphael Baldini was shot dead as he sat in a luxury sport utility vehicle outside a mall in Surrey.

Baldini, 21, held the lease on a Surrey apartment suite where six people — four known gang members and two bystanders — were killed execution-style in October 2007.

His mother tearfully called the killing a case of mistaken identity, but Baldini was facing gun charges.

Police insist they’re throwing all their resources at the problem. Solicitor General John van Dongen, the province’s top cop, says he’s being briefed regularly by ministry officials, police and mayors.

“I’m not only talking to my director of police services, I’m talking to people like Steve Brown, who’s Ed Schellenberg’s brother-in-law, and I’m talking to Eileen Mohan,” he says. “I’ve been talking to them quite actively the past couple of weeks.”

Schellenberg and Eileen Mohan’s son Chris were the innocent victims in the Surrey apartment massacre in 2007. Schellenberg was working on fireplaces in the building and the Mohan lived in an adjacent suite.

Vancouver has gone through previous cycles of open violence, including a series of killings during a war between rival Indo-Canadian gangs in the 1990s.

Since then, there have been lethal hits in restaurants and last year a man was shot to death in the underground parking lot of Vancouver’s upscale Oakridge Mall.

Police reported 58 homicides in the Vancouver area last year, compared with 41 in 2007, and 10 so far this year. Not all are directly gang-related, but police believe most are, especially when killings linked to street drug dealing are included.

Gun deaths, especially, have put residents on edge.

No bystanders were hurt in the most recent shootings but at least one stray round shattered a car window in the attack Friday.

Van Dongen says there’s a pattern to the targeted shootings.

“The vast majority of them tend to involve people who have already had some convictions generally involving to some degree firearms,” he says.

Police also often arrest people carrying guns who are already on bail while facing charges and under court order not to possess firearms, he says.

Van Dongen hired two consultants last summer to review all firearms-related regulations, examine how enforcement agencies tackle the problem and how they communicate with each other. He’s now circulating a draft report that he says contains “a number of actionable recommendations.”

Van Dongen wouldn’t elaborate but said the final version will be made public.

After the Surrey killings, the province formed the Integrated Homicide Investigation Team, a gang task force and violence suppression group, to target gangsters and guns on the street.

The team, which has more than 100 officers from every regional jurisdiction except Vancouver and suburban Delta, was created in 2003 in part to coordinate investigations of gang-style killings that spilled across municipal boundaries.

The biggest obstacle investigators face is an old problem: Many who know who’s responsible are reluctant to talk.

“Generally we do have civilian witnesses that will give us a statement with respect to what occurred that day,” said Sgt. Shinder Kirk of the gang task force, “but what the challenge is, is actually getting those witnesses to carry through. There is an element of intimidation or perceived intimidation, and certainly understandably. These guys are very violent people.”

RCMP Cpl. Peter Thiessen pleaded with gang members’ families.

“We know it’s a tough decision, but they’ve got to look at what’s the right thing to do here,” he says. “These are young adults that are clearly involved in crime and they’re permitted to function within the family home in upscale neighborhoods, putting those neighborhoods at risk, because their family network is allowing it to happen.”