Saskatoon has seen eight homicides in 2024 and it’s still early in the year.
Corey Lenius, staff sergeant with the major crime section of the Saskatoon Police Service spoke about these investigations, saying this year has been an outlier.
“It’s certainly uncharted waters for us this early in the year to have this many homicides, eight already and we’re in April,” Lenius said.
The Saskatoon Police Service responded to 12 homicide investigations in total in 2023.
Lenius said there wasn’t anything definitive to point to as to why Saskatoon has seen this many homicides.
“All the incidents that we’ve investigated have been isolated, so it’s really hard to predict why this is happening in our city right now.”
Lenius said in the majority of these homicides the suspects and victims were known to each other, so he noted that there wasn’t risk to the general public.
“These homicides, a lot of them are happening in situations where people are living a certain lifestyle and they’re more vulnerable to these kinds of things happening to them.”
He said these incidents have been hard on the teams investigating these homicides, but said they have strong partnerships with other sections of the police force that they can draw from if they need those resources.
“Everyone in the department is willing to help out and drop what they’re doing when it comes to a homicide.”
Lenius said they have a good clearance rate, noting that six out of the eight investigations this year have been closed, with the remaining two being the ones that occurred within the past week.
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