Story Of The Year #1

GUNFIRE, DEATHS RELATE TO CUTTHROAT DRUG TRADE

"Bang bang I shot you down Bang bang you hit the ground Bang bang that
awful sound Bang bang I used to shoot you down" - from Bang Bang (My
Baby Shot Me Down)

The eerily cold song of 1973, penned by Sonny Bono and performed by
Nancy Sinatra, could very well stand as Abbotsford's anthem in 2003, a
testament to the shooting gallery that was the city.

Yes, the number one story of the year, with a bullet - the endless
shootings that claimed four lives, injured five others and left a few
others with memories of bullets whizzing by.

And the phrase connected to most of the gunshots? Drug-related.

It began four days into the new year, when a number of shots were
fired on Homeview Street near the downtown core, a stretch of road not
unfamiliar to cops. Nobody was injured.

It ended (so far) on the west side of the city, when a 19-year-old
woman got a bullet in the leg after several shots were fired at a home
on Siskin Drive.

And in between were the murders: Bobby Rehal, a 19-year-old man shot
to death on March 13 as he answered the door in his family's Saturna
Crescent home; Claudio Gomez, 25, and Clem Valentine, 24, whose bodies
were found on June 4 in an Old Clayburn Road house.

It is believed they had been shot and killed two days earlier; A
40-year-old woman whose name has yet to be released, shot to death
inside a Matsqui Prairie home on Clayburn Road in the early morning
hours of Nov. 7. A 40-year-old man was found outside the home with
gunshot wounds, but he survived.

All four murders, are believed to be drug-related, as are the numerous
other shootings, including the attempted hits, outside, on known
criminals Alan "Skeeter" Russell, who survived being shot on March 9
in a drive-by attack on Okanagan Drive, and Lance Wust, who was shot
at while driving on Oakridge Crescent a week later, on March 16.

And there are definite links between some shootings.

On May 24, two carloads of people got into a verbal altercation. It
ended on Centre Street in Clearbrook with a man on the street, shot in
the chest, and another man in a car, shot in the thigh. Both would
survive.

Jason Kavanagh, 25, was driving the car that was shot at and told the
Abbotsford News following the violence: "They (police) thought we had
something to do with it. They tell us it's about drugs. It's not true.
It's just some asshole. We're regular people."

In October, a so-called "regular person," namely Kavanagh, was
charged, along with two other men, with first-degree murder in the
shooting death of Russell MacLeod.

The body of the 24-year-old Abbotsford man was found on Oct. 7 on a
logging road in Spuzzum. The next day, the Mt. Blanchard Drive house
in which MacLeod was living was the target of an arson attack.

All four Abbotsford murders remain unsolved, although it is believed
that the Gomez/Valentine murders are connected to the still-unsolved
stabbing death of a man outside the Luxor nightclub in downtown
Abbotsford a year ago this month, while a number of other shootings
are considered retaliatory strikes.

In June, the tab for investigating the string of shootings and deaths
had reached $380,000.

By September, the cost had jumped to $880,000, and a task force had
been created to probe the violence.