A member of the Brothers Keepers gang is dead and two associates are in hospital after a Thursday night shooting in a busy Burnaby shopping plaza.
The gangster was gunned down in the parking lot of the Market Crossing Mall at Marine Way and Byrne Road about 8:30 p.m. His body was still lying near cars and behind police tape two hours after the shooting.
The two others shot, a man and a woman, were transported to hospital.
Sources said the murder is likely retaliation for the fatal shooting of United Nations gangster Karman Grewal, 28, at Vancouver International Airport on Sunday afternoon.
Someone at the scene confirmed to Postmedia that none of the three were customers of the Cactus Club restaurant in the complex, though they were shot near an outside patio.
Others on the patio screamed and dove for cover after the shots rang out. Broken glass was scattered around the patio.
One woman told Postmedia she and her friend put their name on a list for the outdoor patio before heading to Canadian Tire to look around.
When they returned, the patio close to where the shooting would occur was still busy so they were escorted to another area.
As soon as they sat down, they heard “pop, pop, pop, pop.”
“We didn’t see the shooters — nothing like that. But, just, we saw people diving around. …There was hell. There was broken glass. They were throwing the tables in the air. Oh my God,” she said.
“It’s amazing more people weren’t hurt.”
Burnaby RCMP confirmed the shooting. There were gang enforcement teams from around the region in the parking lot long after the shooting.
The dead man, who was born in 1998, was on probation at the time of his death, having been convicted last October of an assault in Surrey in June 2019. Postmedia knows his identity but is not publishing it until next of kin have been notified.
Retaliation was expected after Grewal’s murder outside YVR’s international terminal Sunday at 3 p.m.
Police across the region said they have their gang enforcement units out on the street trying to target those involved in the conflict.
Grewal’s killer escaped in a maroon-coloured Honda Pilot driven by a second person, shooting at a Richmond RCMP car that tried to chase the vehicle. The SUV was found burning in the 9700-block of Princess Drive about 30 minutes later.
The UN gang has been locked in a bloody battle with both the Brothers Keepers gang and the Red Scorpion/Kang group since at least 2017. All sides have had high-level members killed this year — with retaliation sometimes coming in less than a day.
Murders have happened in busy mall parking lots, crowded parks, near schools and outside a popular restaurant on the Vancouver waterfront.
