The victims of a drive-by shooting in Surrey are two men in their 20s who are associated with drug trade, RCMP say.
The men, aged 23 and 24, arrived at Surrey Memorial Hospital on their own on Sunday, suffering non-life-threatening gunshot wounds. They were injured when shots rang out in a residential neighbourhood in the area of 86th Avenue and Prestige Place shortly after 3 p.m.
Surrey RCMP have not publicly identified the victims, but said that they are known to police. The 24-year-old is from Vancouver, and the 23-year-old is from Surrey, RCMP said. Both either are or were associated with the drug trade, officers said.
The men have been speaking with police, but no suspects have been identified. Both are still in hospital.
Investigators believe the incident, which saw shots fired between a truck and a sedan, was targeted. A burned F-150 – believed to be the truck involved – was located in Cloverdale about half an hour after the shooting.
The incident left some residents of the quiet neighbourhood feeling shaken. One homeowner told CTV News the next day that she heard the gunshots and screeching tires, then later discovered a bullet in her living room.
"We were like, 'What's this mess on the floor? What's going on now?' And we looked over and that's when we realized, hey, a bullet came through the house," Nicki Christian recalled.
It's a room where she spends a lot of time with her grandkids, she said, but she'd been in the backyard with her partner at the time and neither was injured in the incident. Another bullet hit the side of her house.
Other neighbours who heard the shooting said it sounded like fireworks going off.
"One after the other. It wasn't like a 'boom, boom, boom, boom.' It was continuous," Samantha Wise said.
Another witness said his wife was dropping him off before work -- with his toddler, niece and mother-in-law in the car -- when the bullets started to fly around him.
"I thought it was just ordinary firecrackers, but when the bullets hit on the pavement and it smoked a bit I realized that this is already a shootout," Juanito Montenegro told CTV.
"I shouted to my family inside the car to duck down because I can see the bullets were hitting on the pavement in the direction we were."
Montenegro dropped to the ground behind his vehicle, scraping his knee in the process. He tried to see what was going on, and watched the white sedan speed towards him as someone from the silver truck shot at the car.
"I was so scared for my family because they were inside, they could probably be hit by (stray) bullets," he said.
He couldn't see the features of the shooter or shooters, nor could he see the gun, but he saw the sedan speed by him. He said he got the licence plate number of the sedan and called 911 immediately.
"We didn't expect that to happen because it was a beautiful day, we just came from church… It was a usual Sunday routine and then suddenly it happened out of nowhere."
Fortunately no one was injured in the shooting.
The investigation is ongoing, and anyone with information is asked to contact officers at 604-599-0502 or to call Crime Stoppers anonymously at 1-800-222-8477 (TIPS).
Part of the incident was captured on surveillance camera, though a tree branch blocks some of the details.
The vehicles licence plates and the suspects' features cannot easily be made out in the footage, but there are more than 400 traffic cameras in Surrey that police can seek access to, and it's possible that one of the cameras may have captured details that will lead police to the shooters.
With a report from CTV Vancouver's Nafeesa Karim and Michele Brunoro
