'YOU HAVE TO GET OUT NOW'

Abbotsford Police Chief Issues Extraordinary Warning To Youth Tangled
In The Drug Trade

In their final semester of high school, teenagers Dilsher Gill and
Joseph Randay made a fatal decision to take over a Red Scorpion drug
line that had been run by two other young men gunned down in March,
The Vancouver Sun has learned.

Four weeks later, the popular students were also shot dead -- all
because Scorpion rivals wanted to kill anyone perceived to be linked
to Jonathan, Jarrod and Jamie Bacon and their notorious gang.

Now Abbotsford Police Chief Bob Rich, Mayor George Peary and school
officials are issuing an extraordinary public warning to other
teenagers that they too will be targeted if they get involved in the
drug trade.

"It appears to us that these gangs, who have not been completely
successful in eliminating all the targets they want to high up in the
Bacon organization, are now targeting people at any level and that
includes entry-level drug dealers," Rich said Thursday. "The
information that we have is that all four victims were seen as being
associated to the Red Scorpions and the Bacon organization."

Even with the brutal slayings at the end of March of Sean Murphy, 21,
and Ryan Richards, 19, others were willing to step in and fill the
shoes of the front-line Scorpion crew members.

"It starts innocently," Rich said of why teens are lured in.

He said someone might simply say to a vulnerable youth: "You can have
a thousand dollars in your jeans this afternoon if you are willing to
drive this car across into Bellingham."

But Rich, Peary and school board chair Cindy Schafer fear more kids
could die if they don't get out now.

At a news conference Thursday they urged other young people involved
to call a new hotline, 604-864-4787, set up to help them escape.

"This is a warning to all young people who are engaged in the sale of
drugs at any level -- you may be at risk. You may be targeted. You
have to get out," Rich said. "You have to get out now."

Calls are confidential and information provided will not be used by
police in criminal cases, he said.

"We have absolutely no interest in doing anything except saving that
child's life," Rich said.

The chief said he felt compelled to publicly discuss the "working
theory" of the murders of Gill, 17, Randay, 18, Murphy and Richards,
despite continuing probes by the Integrated Homicide Investigation Team.

"We do this today because we feel we need to get this information
into the hands of the public," he said. "All of these deaths are
tragic, but to lose two young men in high school is even more horrific."

He said the link between Randay, Gill and the Bacons themselves was
"distant and tenuous."

But the W.J. Mouat secondary students were selling drugs, he said,
and "the way drug lines work, drug dealers get their product through
street gangs."

The Sun earlier reported the teens were friends with the teenage
brother of Bacon associate Sunny Ahuja.

Both Richards and Murphy were also linked to the Ahuja family, whose
Abbotsford house was targeted in a drive-by shooting March 11.

Rich said most of the violence in Abbotsford has been between the Red
Scorpions, their Bacon associates, and the United Nations gang.

"The Red Scorpions and the Bacons have been the enemies of not just
the UN gang, but other organized crime groups as well."

He said investigators are puzzled about why entry-level teens and
young men would be killed instead of more established gangsters.

"It might be an effective way of wiping out one organized crime
group," he said.

Rich also stressed that no one should think: "I sell drugs for the UN
gang so I am safe."

"Any young person out there now -- because of the potential for
retaliation and the confusion that exists over who is associated with
who -- is at risk if they are involved in the drug trade."

Mayor Peary praised Rich for strategizing on a quick community
response to save lives.

"This is to my mind unprecedented. We have a chief of police who has
pondered the issue before our community and has taken what I think is
a very courageous step in drawing [this] to the attention of our
citizens," Peary said. "We don't want any more. As a community we
want to mobilize to fight this."

Schafer said schools are also responding to the problem by training
staff and educating students about the risks.

"You need to know that as a school district, we maintain a steady
focus on the safety of our students. We are constantly working to
keep our schools a safe place to be," she said.

Rich said the number of high school students involved is small.

"It is a very small number of kids that we are talking about," he
said. "It is a network of kids. It isn't actually one school that we
are talking about and it is probably a handful of kids in each of our
schools that have started down this road."