CAUGHT IN THE CROSSFIRE
15-year-old was killed in botched hit
The night before Matthew Navas-Rivas was shot to death in East Vancouver last month, he was enjoying himself with other members of the Brothers Keepers gang on a boat cruise around the Vancouver waterfront.
Postmedia has obtained photos of the cruise, where Navas-Rivas chatted up other gang members and guests, shirt off, tattoos visible.
While Navas-Rivas appeared to be at ease with his new associates, he had admitted to others in the preceding months that he knew he was in danger.
His murder near Nanaimo and Cambridge streets on July 25 was likely related to a dispute between gangsters incarcerated in B.C. prisons that has spilled out onto city streets, a Postmedia investigation has found.
And he is not the conflict’s only victim.
Postmedia has learned that Navas-Rivas was the target of a shooting on Jan. 13 this year that killed 15-year-old Alfred Wong.
While Navas-Rivas escaped injury that night, some of the gunshots hit Wong ’s family car as he and his parents drove along Broadway.
No one has yet been charged in the killing of the gifted Coquitlam student.
Vancouver Police Supt. Mike Porteous said he couldn’t comment on the case because it is an ongoing investigation.
But sources have confirmed that not only was Navas-Rivas targeted last January, but his close associate Troy McKinnon was murdered hours earlier in Nanaimo.
Both men were associated with the Wolf Pack coalition until a splintering in the alliance led to internal violence.
Some of that violence occurred in federal prisons, including two separate stabbings of Wolf Pack killer Dean Wiwchar.
Wiwchar was attacked in Kent Institution last November, allegedly by inmates associated with McKinnon and Navas-Rivas.
One of those charged with aggravated assault in the attack on Wiwchar, according to court documents, is Cody Sleigh, who was convicted in the same 2011 kidnapping case that sent McKinnon to prison.
Wiwchar, who was convicted of the first-degree murder of a Toronto man in June 2012, has also been charged with the January 2012 murder of B.C. gangster Sandip Duhre in the Sheraton Wall Centre, but has yet to go to trial in that slaying.
Wiwchar has since been transferred to a federal prison in Alberta, where he was recently stabbed again.
Porteous said any splintering that has happened in the Wolf Pack is not among the leadership.
“The higher ups are quiet. The lower you go, the more volatile you see it, and the more fracturing and the more unstable you see it,” Porteous said.
Sometimes the violence relates to incidents in prison or pretrial jail, he said. Sometimes it relates to the fact that some gang members are in custody while others are running their drug lines on the outside. And sometimes it’s just a personal beef.
“When one of their guys gets slighted or he gets threatened or he gets hot-buttered or stabbed or whatever inside jail, a threat will get made to whoever that guy thinks did it and then you will start seeing this violence,” Porteous said.
Staff Sgt. Lindsey Houghton of the Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit said some lowerlevel gangsters get attacked in prison because rivals want to retaliate against gang leaders they can’t reach.
“You are a captive audience in there,” he said.
When some gang members are in jail, their supposed friends on the outside sometimes make power moves, leading to violence within the group, Houghton said.
“So the game of thrones is really on when those people are no longer outside to pull the strings or be the puppet masters of their crews ... and it’s a free-for-all to see who can take over,” he said. “It is a backstabbing, chaotic, paranoidfilled world.”
Gang violence in federal prisons and provincial jails has been an ongoing problem.
Correctional Service Canada official Esther Mailhot said in an email Friday that the department “continues to work diligently to ensure the safety and security of federal institutions.”
“Prison violence is not tolerated. Disciplinary action is taken, and in some cases criminal charges are laid against offenders involved in violent incidents,” she said.
She said institutions carefully manage “gangs, organized crime members and affiliates, as well as incompatible offenders.”
Both McKinnon, the Nanaimo victim, and Navas-Rivas, who will be remembered at a memorial in New Brighton Park on Saturday, were identified in parole decisions as having been involved in a number of violent attacks inside federal prisons.
In McKinnon’s case, the board noted in a decision last year that he had “been segregated on six occasions for various reasons, including assaults on other inmates.”
He maintained gang affiliations while in jail and was believed to be “involved in the institutional drug sub-culture,” the parole decision said.
Because there was concern McKinnon might be hunted once released, the board decided not to place him in a halfway house both because of “the danger that would exist for staff and other residents” and because he would be easy to find “for those wanting to cause (him) harm.”
Instead, the parole board ordered him to live on his own with a curfew, an electronic monitoring bracelet and other conditions that in the end couldn’t save him.
The parole board noted that Navas-Rivas committed several serious acts of violence in the community, then continued on once he was arrested.
“Your violence has continued following incarceration. While in remand you engaged in a fight with another inmate and were suspected of being involved in assaults and co-ordinating assaults against other inmates,” a 2016 parole decision said.
“Your behaviour did not improve following your transfer into the federal system. You have reportedly been involved in four assaults against other inmates. In two of these assaults, an edged weapon was used.”
In one of the prison attacks, he punched his victim before “later
Higher ups are quiet. The lower you go, the more volatile you see it, and the more fracturing and the more unstable you see it.
using an ice pick-style weapon to stab him multiple times,” the parole documents said. “You and your two accomplices then punched, kicked and kneed the victim even after being ordered to stop by correctional staff.”