‘ I guess the police do what they can do’
Son kept his distance from family after choosing the criminal lifestyle that led to his murder
As soon as Dianne Monds found out her son Ricardo Scarpino had been shot, she made her way to the crime scene outside Gotham restaurant in downtown Vancouver.
“My sisters and I, we stood on the outskirts for hours and hours,” Monds recalled in a recent interview.
It was January 2008 and Scarpino was spread out on the cold pavement beside the SUV he’d been driving to his engagement party at the highend steak house.
“I think I was concerned because my son was just laying there when we got there and then police put a tarp over top of him,” Monds said. “Finally I went to one of the police officers and I said: ‘ I don’t want to cause any trouble. … I’m Ricardo’s mother. Can I just come where I am not just standing on the road getting run over almost?’ He was very nice. He let us stand this side of the steak house.”
The mother of seven says it was surreal living through the violent demise of her 37- yearold son, though he had admitted to her years earlier that he had chosen a criminal lifestyle.
“I came back the next day with one of our traditional people because I am a Metis,” said Monds, a community elder. “We smudged the whole area and we lit the candles. That was our way of letting things go.”
More than six years later, Monds is wondering whether anyone will ever get arrested in the targeted shooting, which also left Scarpino’s roommate Gilles LePage dead.
“The worst part is not knowing exactly what’s happened. I guess the police do what they can do. It’s the same thing as all these other people who’ve been killed too. How many of them have been solved?”
Monds said she calls Vancouver police at least once a year to see if there’s any news.
“They haven’t called me for years,” she said of investigators. “They are probably doing the best that they can. But you would like a little bit of closure. Not that you’d like to go to a trial for someone who’s murdered your son.”
Ricardo Francis Scarpino was a happy, social child. When his family lived in Williams Lake, he would play all day in the woods with other kids. When he moved with his mom and stepdad as a teen to Cumberland, he got involved in theatre and break dancing. He also loved to ski and have his friends sleep over for video nights.
The family settled in Victoria, where Scarpino got immersed in high school sports — basketball and track. He also worked at a smoothie kiosk in the mall so he could have cash for brand- name clothes.
“Growing up, he was always laughing. He was always full of fun. He liked to have attention drawn to him,” Monds said.
The future drug dealer even made a movie at Belmont Secondary about the risks of drugs.
When he graduated in 1988, he went to California and worked as a bail bondsman, where he got arrested in the fatal shooting of a man he was trying to apprehend. He convinced a court it was a matter of self- defence and was sentenced to 27 months for firearms violations.
“When he came back from California, he came to Matsqui and he was released.” He worked as a model, even living in Japan for a stretch.
In the mid- 1990s, Scarpino took Monds to a nice Vancouver restaurant and broke some devastating news about his criminal associates.
“He said ‘ Mom, I want you to know that I love you with all my heart, but this is my chosen family.’ So it broke my heart because it was kind of like — I won’t be seeing you again for a bit,” Monds said.
Scarpino distanced himself from his large family, keeping in touch by phone and visiting only for Christmas dinner and other special occasions, where he would dote on his nieces and nephews.
There were other charges and stints in jail.
Scarpino got engaged just months before his murder and finally began to reconnect with relatives.
“This all happened after he decided he was going to change his life around, you know.”
Monds has asked herself over the years why her son made the choices he did in life.
“From the time that Ricardo was a teenager, he didn’t even smoke. That was the thing. He didn’t use a whole lot of drugs from what I understand. If you turn back the clock, I think as a parent I did the best I could with the tools that I had,” Monds said.
“I don’t feel that I could do anything any different except love him. And that’s with all of my children. Their choices are their choices. And I as a parent don’t feel responsible for their bad choices.”
As an elder and volunteer, she is concerned about the gang violence plaguing the Lower Mainland.
‘ I don’t feel that I could do anything any different except love him.’
DIANNE MONDS, MOTHER
She thinks there should be more intervention for troubled youth at an earlier age.
“Most of these young people who get involved, they are not going to tell you,” Monds said. “Those kids are under such a strain because they’ve got those people on top of them that are holding their hand over their head and they’re scared. So what are they supposed to do? More crime, more drugs, more alcohol. And even the police, they can’t do anything. They try.” Monds misses her son. “It didn’t matter where he was — even when he was in jail — he still made sure I got flowers. I miss that part.”
But she admits she felt more traumatized by the unexplained death of her granddaughter in hospital two years ago.
“That’s not a nice thing to say,” Monds confessed. “When Ricardo got shot, I was in shock but I am going to tell you the truth — it didn’t surprise me because he had been looking over his shoulder off and on for a long time. And I felt that he was more at peace with the Lord than he was walking around in his shoes.”