No charges laid in city’s 30th homicide of the year

No charges have been laid in Edmonton’s latest homicide in which a 38-year-old Edmonton man died of blunt force trauma to the head, injuries sustained in an altercation at the Evergreen Mobile Home Park. Edmonton homicide detectives, in consultation with Crown prosecutors, deemed the death earlier this month as non-culpable. Police had attended the mobile home park near 167 Avenue and 6 Street in the city’s far northeast at 11:45 p.m. on July 12 following reports of a physical confrontation between the victim and a 26-yearold man. The victim sustained lifethreatening head injuries and was treated at the scene by paramedics before being taken to hospital. He died three days later. Police were not releasing the name of the deceased or the other man involved in the altercation in the investigation because “it does not serve an investigative purpose, there is no risk to public safety and the EPS has a duty to protect the privacy rights of the victims and their families,” said a police news release. The man’s death is the city’s 30th homicide of the year, although police are not including two files — one where charges were dropped after a hit-and-run, and another file where an officer fatally shot a civilian. The Edmonton Police Service hasn’t named 14 victims city police categorized as homicides in 2017. By the same time last year, there had been 29 homicides in Edmonton. Police Chief Rod Knecht said while the number of homicides is concerning, the slayings have little in common. “It’s not like we have a number of gang-related homicides, or they’re all domestic-related — they really run the gamut,” he said. “We’re very consistent with what we were last year. I think we had a rash that caused some concerns,” he said, referring to a period in June that saw five homicides in 11 days. “But I think we’re almost exactly the number we had last year, within one or two.” There were a record 48 homicides in 2011.