Victim went from hoops star to gangster
He was once a basketball star for Tamanawis secondary, earning the most valuable player award in a 2007 tournament organized by the Surrey RCMP.
But it was a more dangerous game that led to Arundeep Cheema’s murder in North Delta Friday. The 23-year-old gangster and longtime affiliate of the Dhak group was shot to death in a vehicle outside the home of an associate.
Delta police haven’t released descriptions of possible suspects in the shooting, but have confirmed the murder was targeted and that both Cheema and residents of the house where he was killed are known to them.
Cheema, who lived in Surrey, had been on police radar since his teenage years, according to Sgt. Lindsey Houghton of the Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit, B.C.’s antigang agency.
Houghton said that despite his youth, Cheema had been associated with a gang headed by Sukh Dhak until Dhak’s November 2012 murder.
“He was and continued to be affiliated with people who we consider to be a part of the Dhak-Duhre side of the gang conflict,” Houghton said Monday.
Houghton said that while the namesakes of the Dhak-Duhre gang alliance have all been killed off, their loyal associates have continued to be involved in the drug trade, though not in one cohesive gang.
“There are at least a few different little groups that have splintered off from that,” Houghton said. “It’s accurate to say this Arun would have been on that side of the conflict. Four years ago when he was a teenager, he was associated to that side of things and he remained on that side of things within at least one of the factions.”
Cheema was convicted of trafficking in Surrey in October 2010 and got a 12-month conditional sentence and a 10-year firearms ban. He faced another trafficking charge in Delta with an associate the same year, but it was later dismissed.
Cheema was stopped by Abbotsford police in September 2012 in the aftermath of an early-morning targeted shooting at the house of a Red Scorpion gangster.
In the vehicle with him at the time was Dhak associate Jujhar Singh Khun-Khun and two other gangsters.
Khun-Khun is in custody awaiting a murder trial for the August 2011 Kelowna slaying of Red Scorpion Jonathan Bacon.
Abbotsford police went to court to obtain a search warrant for the vehicle, but didn’t collect enough evidence to support charges, Const. Ian MacDonald said Monday.
MacDonald said neither the 2012 shooting targets nor the four men stopped were “particularly helpful.”
“This incident takes place in a relatively rural area around 2:30 in the morning. So you don’t have a lot of eyewitnesses,” MacDonald said. “Nobody was really offering very much in what we would consider to be a useful or credible story. I hate to say it but that’s the story at almost every targeted incident in the Lower Mainland.”
Cheema’s murder is the first of 2015 in Metro Vancouver. Anyone with information is asked to call Delta Police at 604-946-4411.