Second homicide in the city in 2023 raises concerns about the high crime rate.
The Prince George RCMP is looking into the city’s second woman-killing homicide in less than two weeks.
Between midnight and one in the morning, both women were discovered dead inside of homes.
Tuesday, RCMP Cpl Jennifer Cooper reported that after responding to a report of a disturbance, officers discovered a woman dead inside a home in the Sunrise Valley Mobile Home Park.
A block of residences in the mobile home park had both ends sealed off by unmarked police cars. Police tape was wrapped around multiple vehicles, and RCMP cruisers and uniformed investigators could be seen travelling down an icy road.
Cooper reports that two ladies were observed leaving the house after midnight, and serious crime unit investigators are trying to identify them.
A different woman was discovered dead in her home ten days earlier, on February 4, at the Millar Addition on 17th Avenue and Fir Street, a peaceful residential neighborhood just a few doors away from the well-liked Lheidli T’enneh Memorial Park.
RCMP cruisers were parked outside the little yellow house last week for six days while they looked into a “strange death,” as they put it.
Cooper stated that although it has since been confirmed that the death was a homicide, no further information will be made public “because to the privacy of the deceased.”
Cooper told CBC News on Tuesday that it was “too early in the inquiry to establish any linkages between the two deaths.” “There’s nothing completely clear.”
Mayor Simon Yu of Prince George said to CBC News, “It’s not the kind of news we want to hear.”Are they only a one-off occurrence or do they represent a trend? This has undoubtedly hurt the city’s reputation.”
Yu expressed his sympathies to the families of the women. “But not just the family is affected. It is the entire community.”
According to the RCMP, Prince George saw six homicides in 2022 and 2021, one homicide in 2020, and two homicides in 2019.
The RCMP in Prince George is dealing with more crime than virtually any other community in the province, according to a report that was given to Prince George council in December 2022 in support of greater police budget.
Local councilors were informed by one of the report’s authors, Surrey-based criminologist Curt Griffiths of Simon Fraser University, that the city’s crime issue was not one of perception vs. fact.
People should be afraid of crime, he added, so they are.
