Back in February, 2009, I received a phone call from a worried parent.
Her child’s school class was scheduled to go on a tour of a business near the Colossus theatre in Walnut Grove, and she was worried that random gunfire might be a possibility.
While that worry may sound far-fetched today, it wasn’t an unreasonabhle fear. Kevin LeClair had just been shot and killed in broad daylight at the adjacent Thunderbird Village shopping centre, in front of dozens of people on a sunny Friday afternoon. It was clearly a targeted revenge killing — that was obvious from the start. But no one knew who the next target would be, or where the hit would be attempted.
The sense of fear that many people in Langley had in early 2009 was palpable. It caused federal and provincial cabinet ministers to visit (federal Public Safety Minister Peter Van Loan held a press conference near the site of the shooting). It caused the B.C. government to go to Ottawa with a shopping list of legislative and administrative changes it felt were neceesary to deal with gangsters.
Langley RCMP were on high alert. Even though Langley wasn’t home to a large number of suspected gangsters, they were often passing through, as many were based in either Surrey or Abbotsford.
It was also known that many liked to frequent the entertainment and restaurant district near Colossus, just off Highway 1.
Now the police have identified and charged those whom they believe killed Leclair, a close associate of the Bacon brothers in the Red Scorpions gang. All have ties to the rival United Nations gang. Some UN gangsters now also face charges in the death of an innocent man, Jonathan Barber, who was shot and killed in Burnaby while driving a vehicle belonging to one of the Bacons. He was to install a sound system in the vehicle.
Several are already in jail in B.C., and UN gang leader Clayton Roueche is in jail in the United States, and is unlikely to get out anytime soon.
While there is no longer a sense of fear, people need to stay cautious. Dealings with these people should be avoided, as they all have weapons and are completely indifferent to the potential harm they may cause to others.
Hopefully, all those named by police at a Monday press conference will soon be behind bars, and hopefully after their trials are over, they will be staying there for a long time — 25 years or more.
The gang wars are fought over drugs, and specifically who will reap the enormous profits that flow from drug sales.
It wouldn’t matter if every member of the UN Gang and the Red Scorpions was in jail. There would still be a trade in drugs, and control would be handled by armed young hoodlums.
In the longer run, we as a society need to closely examine the role of drugs in our culture. Is there a place for legal sales of marijuana, as there is for liquor — under government control, with huge markups going to those governments? There is no simple answer about how best to deal with it, but marijuana is a big factor in the drug trade.
For the present, those in the drug trade won’t stop shooting each other, just because there have been some arrests.