The Edmonton Police Service has laid charges in a drive-by shooting last week on the north side and is now doing ballistics testing to see if one of the guns used has also been involved in crime not just in the city, but across Canada.
The shooting happened the afternoon of March 31, when the two cars drove up 97 Street north of Yellowhead Trail, reportedly firing dozens of bullets back and forth at each other.
“It’s miraculous that nobody was struck with one of the stray bullets. I know we had some close calls in some businesses where someone could have been standing,” Staff Sgt. Eric Stewart with the firearms investigations unit said.
Investigators believe between 20 and 30 rounds were fired between a white Toyota Camry and a black Hyundai Sonata.
“It’s amazing to me, with how many rounds were fired between the two vehicles with a total disregard of what’s behind in the background, that we had no injuries.”
“We’re very lucky that no innocent people were struck.”
Police responded to an initial weapons complaint on 97 Street near 125 Avenue, where it was reported that two vehicles exchanged gunfire.
A Money Mart and several other businesses in that area were blocked off with police tape.
The shooting ended another 10 blocks north, where one of the cars pulled into the Griesbach Village shopping complex on the northwest corner of 97 Street and 137 Avenue.
That’s where two men were found and arrested.
One of them, a 30-year-old man, was taken to hospital with a non-life-threatening gunshot wound but has since been released. As of Thursday, police said no charges against him have been laid.
He’s believed to be the only person injured in the shooting.
Police initially said a gun was recovered from a white Toyota Camry with Saskatchewan plates.
However, in an update Thursday, EPS clarified the firearm was actually found at a nearby Shoppers Drug Mart, where investigators believe the men from the Camry ditched the gun among the store shelves.
“We are processing that firearm and the spent casings recovered from this event through IBIS, or the integrated ballistic identification system, to develop leads not only in this event but other shooting events both in and outside of Edmonton,” Stewart said.
Previously, Edmonton police had to ship bullets and casings off to the RCMP’s lab to be analyzed.
Stewart said because of the volume of evidence being sent to RCMP, the turnaround time on results wasn’t always the quickest.
In November 2020, the EPS purchased an integrated ballistics identification system to be able to analyze cartridge casings and link shooting events more quickly.
IBIS systems help police to link bullets and cartridges from a crime scene to specific firearms, by matching markings against national and international databases of millions of bullets and cartridge cases.
The RCMP also maintains a national database — the Canadian Integrated Ballistics Identification Network (CIBIN) — and now the two policing agencies work together to process evidence.
“They’re able to do the confirmations for us to develop our investigative leads, presumptive leads through the CIBIN databank in Ottawa. And we can do this in real-time by uploading and doing the work here on our own,” Stewart said.
EPS said 952 files were analyzed by its IBIS instrument in 2022 — compared with 756 in 2021.
This resulted in 39 leads generated, potentially linking the firearms to other investigations.
“This technology, combined with our partnership with the RCMP’s CIBIN, has been crucial in helping us advance our firearms investigations,” Stewart said.
Stewart said police in Calgary and Winnipeg are also using IBIS technology and other agencies in Canada are looking into it.
“It expedites the turnaround time on developing these leads and connecting shooting events,” Stewart said.
“It allows us to share the intelligence with other agencies, when we do seize a firearm or we do have a shooting event, and we’re able to connect that to another event in another city, another province — we can share that information more in a real-time fashion.”
Stewart said IBIS technology is what allowed the Edmonton Police Service to confirm the same gun used to shoot a man in the head at a Pizza Hut was also used to kill two of its officers last month.
Stewart said there’s also a historical north-side homicide from 2012 that police are using IBIS and CIBIN to investigate, but more details on that case were not shared at that time.
On April 21, EPS said its historical crimes section continues to look into the death of Chad Jordan Swanson, who was the city’s third homicide victim of that year.
Two pedestrians noticed a black Chevy Tahoe, parked irregularly on a cul-de-sac near 113 Street and 167A Avenue in the evening of March 29, 2012, a bullet hole through the windshield.
Swanson, 26, sat dead in the driver’s seat with obvious trauma to his body, just a few blocks from where he had played with his eight-year-old son earlier that day.
Investigators quickly determined Swanson was the victim of homicide but no charges have ever been laid in his death.
More than a decade later, Edmonton police said progress has been made due to IBIS and CIBIN, but did not disclose exactly what that meant.
“These advancements have helped us glean more information about the firearm used in this offence and have assured us that there are still people out there who know more about the circumstances of Mr. Swanson’s murder,” said Staff Sgt. James Vanderland in a statement.
“We’d like to be able to bring some closure to Mr. Swanson’s family who have had to live without answers for over a decade,” Vanderland said.
“I also want to remind people that it’s never too late to do the right thing.”
Friday’s shooting is not believed to be random, police said. Police are still searching for the black Hyundai Sonata sedan with an Alberta licence plate ending 073.
It’s the 46th shooting to happen in Edmonton since the start of 2023.
“It’s about a 40 to 45 per cent increase from last year. So gun crime is to continue to be on the rise,” Stewart said, noting he’s said that several times at news conferences over the past year.
EPS said multiple charges have been laid against the passenger of the Toyota.
Asser Asser, 23, has been charged with five firearms-related offences, including intentionally discharging a firearm while being reckless, possession of a loaded prohibited or restricted firearm, and unauthorized possession of a firearm in a vehicle.
Edmonton police said there were 165 shootings reported in 2022, up from 150 in 2021. That means shootings increased by 10 per cent over one year.
EPS said Edmonton saw an average of more than 13 shootings per month last year.
Of the 165 shootings last year, 85 per cent are believed to be targeted, up from 72 per cent in 2021.
About 10 to 15 per cent of 2022 shootings were directly connected to organized crime or gang activity.
Police said 90 per cent of the shootings resulted in injuries and nearly all of them had the potential for bystanders to be harmed. In 21 of those events, children were in the vicinity.
The area that saw the most shootings was northwest Edmonton, EPS said, which had 32. Southeast had the next highest, with 30 shootings in 2022.
Shooting investigations are taxing, require a lot of resources and can take, on average, four to six months to complete, police said in a similar news conference earlier this year.
Anyone with dashcam video and any witnesses of the shooting are asked to contact Edmonton police at 780-423-4567 or #377 from a mobile phone.
Anonymous information can be submitted to Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-8477 or p3tips.com online.
— with files from Emily Mertz, Global News