Bacon plea deal upsets victim’s mother
Bacon plea deal in her son’s 2007 slaying means there will not be a murder trial
A Surrey mother whose son was an unintended victim of the 2007 Surrey Six slayings is disappointed with a plea agreement prosecutors have reached with notorious Red Scorpion gangster Jamie Bacon.
Eileen Mohan said she will be in B.C. Supreme Court on Thursday when details of the deal will be disclosed.
But Mohan said she wanted Bacon to go to trial on the original first-degree murder and conspiracy charges laid on April 3, 2009.
“I would have preferred this to go to trial. Honestly, I would have taken my chances at the trial — whatever the outcome — rather than him cutting a sweetheart deal,” Mohan said. “It’s very difficult to accept and understand how our laws are. I’m quite, quite emotional.”
Mohan’s son, Christopher, then 22, was on his way to a basketball game on Oct. 19, 2007, when he encountered a killer in the hallway outside his family’s suite in Surrey’s Balmoral Tower.
Chris was dragged into a neighbour’s penthouse unit and shot in the head along with drug dealer Corey Lal, Lal’s brother Michael, his associates Ryan Bartolomeo and Eddie Narong, and fireplace repairman Ed Schellenberg.
Bacon is expected to plead guilty only to the conspiracy count related to the Surrey Six.
He will also admit his guilt to counselling someone to commit murder in connection with an attempted hit on former associate Dennis Karbovanec on Dec. 31, 2008. Karbovanec was not seriously injured in the shooting.
Postmedia revealed Monday that a plea deal had been reached in both cases. The surprising development came in a brief appearance by Crown prosecutors and defence lawyers before Associate Chief Justice Heather Holmes on Monday.
Bacon’s lawyer Chris Johnson said: “We have arrived at a disposition on both of these matters with our learned friends in the Crown and we are proposing sentencing by way of joint submission.”
Details of the joint sentencing proposal weren’t released to Holmes. Bacon won a stay of his Surrey Six charges on Dec. 1, 2017, after a secret B.C. Supreme Court hearing before Justice Kathleen Ker.
Then on May 21, 2020, the B.C. Court of Appeal overturned the judicial stays and ordered a new trial for Bacon, leading to negotiations and the plea deal.
Mohan said Bacon dragged out the case for more than a decade. “Then when he knows he’s cornered, he decides to plead guilty.”
Bacon was in the middle of a jury trial on the counselling charge when the case was adjourned in March due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It had been expected to resume in August.
Two of Bacon’s fellow Red Scorpions gang associates — Cody Haevischer and Matthew Johnston — were convicted in 2014 of first-degree murder and conspiracy. They are both appealing.
Their trial heard that Bacon ordered the hit of rival drug trafficker Corey Lal that spiralled out of control when Haevischer, Johnston and a man identified as Person X arrived and ended up shooting Lal, three of his associates and the two bystanders.