The ThunderBlogs

It was raining on Thursday at 8:15 p.m. when a man walked into the Happy Bloom Restaurant on Kingsway, shot one man in front of witnesses, and then left, according to reporters already at the scene.

An hour and a half after the shooting the Chinese restaurant was still cordoned off by crime scene investigators. There was an ambulance and a VPD squad car silently parked on the street. Two TV reporter vans were parked across the restaurant in the busy McDonalds parking lot.

Besides the police and the few reporters it was hard to tell anything significant had happened in the last few hours. Several 20-year-old Asian looking men waited under the bus stop shelter only three metres from police tape looking away in the direction of the bus. Vehicles continued to come and go from the McDonalds, and passersby navigated the blocked-off sidewalk and instead walked on Kingsway Street to continue down the block.

Police had not yet made a statement as to the motive or any details of the victim by 10:00 p.m. Three reporters stood between the bus shelter and the police tape, huddled under the building overhang to stay out of the rain. Kate Webb from The Province had been waiting to hear from police for over an hour, she said. Jon Woodward of CTV news was asking where his news van was, while holding a microphone, and water dripped off of the hood of his rain jacket.

A week before Const. Heather Brown, Community Collingwood Policing Centre, had said there was no gang crime in the area that she was aware of, and rarely any violent crime, when questioned about graffiti between the Nanaimo and 29^th Street SkyTrain stations.

The area of the shooting was just two blocks from the Collingwood policing ward. When approached at the policing centre the next night and asked about the shooting, volunteers there said they hadn’t heard of the news.  That section of the city was under the Cedar Cottage Policing Centre supervision.

Even though this is only the eighth murder of the year in Vancouver—reported by Kim Bolan, from The Vancouver Sun, who talked to Const. Lindsay Houghton at the scene—pedestrians in the area didn’t seem to be too concerned about their safety around the scene the night of the shooting.

The reporters were still standing under the overhang, joking with each other, waiting for a statement at 10:30 p.m. The rain wasn’t giving up. Crime scene investigators continued searching the restaurant and a gunman was off somewhere in the night.