Black Friday victim one of three brothers with checkered pasts

The same Ottawa police detectives who charged his brother with two counts of first-degree murder in separate homicides are now investigating the Black Friday killing of Yonis Barkhadle.

Yonis, 27, was shot multiple times, in what police are probing as a targeted attack, around 6:20 p.m. Friday in a packed South Keys Shopping Centre parking lot. He was found with multiple gunshot wounds in a lot on the north side of the mall.

The homicide occurred in the CIBC parking lot next to OC Transpo’s Greenboro transit station. Yonis was rushed to hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

Yonis, also known as “Yoshi,” is one of three Barkhadle brothers who are well known to police in this city.

His eldest brother, Mohamad Barkhadle, a crack dealer, was charged by the Ottawa police homicide squad with strangling a 35-year-old woman inside her Burnside Avenue apartment in March 2017.

The woman, whose name remains shielded by a publication ban, was killed while her two-yearold son was inside the apartment, where he remained alone for 10 days before a maintenance worker in the building discovered his mother’s body.

While Mohamad Barkhadle was in jail at the Ottawa-Carleton Detention Centre, police charged him with a second murder after fellow inmate Marco Michaud — also an accused killer — was allegedly jumped, beaten and left brain-dead in April 2018. In May, Michaud was taken off life support.

Middle brother Ismail Barkhadle was arrested alongside Yonis in a 2014 raid on a Heron Gate home that police believed had been taken over by eight men involved in criminal activities.

Ismail was charged with several gun crimes and forcible confinement.

Yonis, meanwhile, was charged with possessing drugs for the purpose of trafficking, drug possession, possessing proceeds of crime and forcible confinement. Later that year he was convicted only of unlawfully being in a dwelling with intent to commit a crime and failing to comply with previous conditions set by the court.

In September of this year, he was convicted of drug possession.

Up until his death, police believed Yonis was tied to gang and drug-dealing activity in the city’s south end.

The slain man was due to appear in court Friday on a charge of failing to previously appear for a court date.

Police continue to investigate his killing — the city’s 17th of the year. No arrests have been made.