Two guilty of murder in 2009 shooting

VANCOUVER — Two men have been convicted of shooting another man to death on one of Vancouver’s busiest streets.

A B.C. Supreme Court jury on Monday found Kevin Jones and Colin Stewart guilty of the Sept. 29, 2009, first-degree murder of Rajinder Soomel on Cambie Street.

After the seven-woman, fiveman jury had handed down their verdict, B.C. Supreme Court Justice Catherine Wedge imposed on the two men the mandatory sen- tence of life in prison, with no parole eligibility for 25 years.

Court heard that horrified bystanders watched two men chase Soomel across Cambie Street and fire 10 shots, eight of them hitting the victim.

The intended victim was Randy Naicker, a resident in a nearby halfway house where Soomel was also staying. Before the shooting, the two gunmen had burst into the Dick Bell-Irving halfway house near West 21st Avenue and Cambie.

The gunmen pointed their firearms at a halfway house worker and demanded to know where Naicker, who had moved into the home five days earlier after being released from prison, was located.

A worker, mistakenly believing that Naicker had just checked out of the house and gone to a nearby store, told the men he’d just left. In fact, it was Soomel who had just left the home.

After firing five shots into Soomel’s back and three into his face, the gunmen fled the scene in a vehicle. The 911 dispatch centre was flooded with calls about the shooting.