A senior RCMP officer says the Surrey Six investigation was plagued by a number of challenges, including an escalating gang war at the time of the October 2007 murders, an evidentiary hearing was told Wednesday.
Assistant Commissioner David Teboul told a B.C. Supreme Court judge that there was a shooting at least every three or four days as the Red Scorpion gangsters behind the slayings continued to battle with their main rival at the time — the UN gang.
“One of the many challenges in this investigation was the high propensity and the intensity of the violence inflicted by organized crime groups, including the Red Scorpion gang in B.C.’s Lower Mainland,” Teboul told Justice Martha Devlin.
There was a lot of public pressure to solve the murders of drug traffickers Corey Lal, his brother Michael, Eddie Narong, Ryan Bartolomeo and bystanders Ed Schellenberg and Chris Mohan.
“The public scrutiny that was placed on this case was immense, and I would say, in fact, unprecedented in my career,” Teboul testified. “As part of that public scrutiny, the media and the public could not forget — even to this day — that two people that had nothing to do with criminality were executed in that apartment.”
Teboul is the first witness in an evidentiary hearing to determine if misconduct by some Surrey Six investigators amounted to an abuse of process warranting the staying of charges against killer Cody Haevischer.
Haevischer and his co-accused, Matthew Johnston, were convicted 10 years ago of first-degree murder but won a Supreme Court of Canada challenge to have the police misconduct reviewed. Johnston died in jail in December 2022.
Former Mountie Derek Brassington pleaded guilty in 2019 of breach of trust and obstruction of justice after he had an inappropriate sexual relationship with a potential witness who can only be identified as Jane Doe 1. Two other ex-officers, Dave Attew and Danny Michaud, pleaded guilty to failing to maintain law and order under the RCMP Act. All three are scheduled to testify at the four-month hearing.
Teboul said that while the Integrated Homicide Investigation Team was taking an “aggressive” approach on the Surrey Six case, no one ever said to “win at all costs.”
And Teboul answered “absolutely not” when prosecutor Mark Wolf asked if he was ever “part of any briefing or meeting where investigators were told that they could violate the code of conduct in order to solve this crime.”
He said the team was dedicated to catch the Surrey Six killers within the legal and ethical parameters mandated in IHIT regulations.
But some routine investigative technics like suspect surveillance were dangerous for officers who could have been mistaken for Red Scorpion rivals and thus targeted, Teboul said.
“There was also risks of being caught in an exchange of gunfire … between rival gangsters,” he said.
Likewise, the use of undercover officers to infiltrate the gang was riskier than in other investigations because of the paranoia of the Scorpions at the time.
“It would mean that we have to expose our officers, our undercover officers, to heightened risks,” he said.
The violence improved after the arrest of Haevischer and other suspects in April 2009, Teboul said, along with the arrests of several UN gang members in a parallel murder investigation.
As for the relationship between Brassington and Doe 1, Teboul said he saw them together in another Canadian city in July 2009 but didn’t notice any behaviour that crossed the line at the time.
Still, he thought the fact Brassington was alone with the woman was inappropriate but not a code of conduct breach.
“I didn’t see open displays — like public displays — of affection between the two of them in front of me. I didn’t see them behave in a manner that I would have reasonably been able to interpret that there’s an intimate relationship occurring,” he testified. “What I was left with was that his presence there, by himself, with her, was inappropriate.”
The hearing continues.
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