Victim of homicide identified
The victim of Monday’s homicide was a longtime Penticton car salesman, The Herald has learned. Dale Atkinson, 63, worked most recently at Penticton Kia, where staff was stunned by the news, according to general manager Kevin Tameling.
“We’re reeling a bit from it, but we’re getting through it,” he said Wednesday.
Tameling only recently joined the dealership and didn’t know Atkinson well, but had formed a good impression of him.
“In the time that I spent with him, he seemed like a great guy. He had lots of friends in the community – he’s been selling cars here for 25-plus years,” said Tameling.
“I know he had several customers that he had sold dozens of cars to over the years. Obviously they kept coming back for a reason.”
Summerland resident Andrew Werner first met Atkinson 40 years ago in Calgary, where they sold cars together.
The two maintained their friendship over the years after they both landed in the South Okanagan and even had a golf date scheduled this week.
Werner, who recently retired as a salesman at Subaru of Penticton, said his friend also enjoyed hockey and poker, and had a “rather dry and irreverent sense of humour.”
Atkinson, he continued, never had children and recently lost his mother. He is survived only by a sister in Vancouver.
Werner said Atkinson recently confided in him that he hadn’t been getting along with his commonlaw wife of 20-plus years, whom police arrested and subsequently released without charges in connection with his stabbing death inside their home at 1154 Woodlands Drive.
“I don’t know him as a bad or violent person,” added Werner.
“It’s hard to know what transpired with that and one can’t jump to conclusions.”
As of Wednesday afternoon, the home at 1154 Woodlands Drive was still guarded by just a single police cruiser.
Police have released few details of their investigation so far, other than to say it’s ongoing and involves an isolated incident that poses no threat to the public at large.