‘A really beautiful soul’: Family mourns 23-year-old killed in Surrey shooting

The family of a young woman shot dead in North Surrey last week is speaking out.

Shana Morris, 23, and a man in his 40s were found with gunshot wounds at a house on the Whalley-Guildford border last Thursday. She died in hospital.

“She didn’t deserve to go out this way — nobody does,” Shana’s uncle Ryan Morris told Global News. “Shana was a really beautiful soul.”

“I’m still having a difficult time wrapping my head around what happened and the manner that it happened.”

Shana grew up in Surrey, and spent a number of years in the care of the Ministry of Children and Family Development, her mother Kerry told Global News.

While she excelled academically, she battled mental health issues throughout her life, along with addictions beginning in her late teens, she said.

“Everything she did was heartfelt,” she said. “She just had a very big heart, even if we didn’t see her all the time or know what was going on with her all the time.”

Those experiences with the MCFD led Shana to an interest in a potential career in social work or addictions counselling, her sister Paige Harris said.

“She always wanted to help people but had a hard time helping herself,” she said.

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In recent years, she became fearful and expressed on several occasions that she felt something bad was going to happen. While family had offered her somewhere to stay in Chilliwack, she didn’t take them up on it, Morris said.

“Sometimes people get wrapped up in things that are beyond their scope of what they’re aware of. And you know, it’s like the old adage, sometimes we bite off more than we can chew,” he said.

“Living in that fear, in that lifestyle — there’s a lot of fentanyl overdoses happening, and this is an even more tragic side of the ongoing epidemic that we have with fentanyl.”

Homicide investigators do not believe the shooting was random, but have offered no details on a suspect or motive.

The investigation remains ongoing.

Morris has started a GoFundMe campaign to raise money to cover Shana’s funeral and her headstone.

-With files from Grace Ke