Police treating all four as homicides, but won’t rule out murder-suicide
DAVID GONCZOL/for Metro Ottawa
A police officer leaves the house at 175 Grandpark Circle yesterday where officers responding to a call by a worried relative discovered the bodies of a man and three women. Bottom left, Raman Dhindsa reacts to learning the deceased were members of the city’s tight-knit Sikh community.
Forensic investigators yesterday discovered a fourth dead body inside a city house where they had already been called to probe the deaths of three people.
A man and two females were found dead at 175 Grandpark Circle, near Conroy Road, shortly after 9 a.m. Officers had cordoned the area and been on site for hours when forensic investigators found a fourth body, that of a woman, in the house at 1:15 p.m.
While Ottawa Police last night were treating all four deaths as homicides, they would not rule out a murder-suicide scenario.
The discovery appears to be the city’s third multiple murder of 2007 and could be Ottawa’s second triple homicide in five months, after Alban and Raymonde Garon and their friend Marie-Clair Beniskos were found dead in a Riverside Dr. apartment on June 30.
Const. Alain Boucher said police entered the house at 9:15 a.m. at the request of a worried family member who could not contact the residents.
“They quickly located three bodies,” said Boucher. “In order to keep the integrity of the investigation … officers pulled back and waited for forensic and other officers to attend.”
Forensic officers later discovered the fourth body.
Police declined to say where in the house the bodies were found, how or when the persons died, and would not identify the deceased.
Municipal documents indicate that Santbir Singh Brar and Amarjeet Brar are the registered owners of the property.
News of the deaths spread quickly by telephone through Ottawa’s small but tightly knit Sikh community. Dalbag Dhindsa, who arrived to view the crime scene, identified the Brar family as the house’s occupants.
“We are not related to them but they still belong to the community so we are trying to find out what the hell happened. It’s shocking,” he said, adding that the family “kept to themselves.”
The grisly discovery shocked neighbourhood residents.
“That is the only house on the street where I didn’t know who they were,” said Chantelle Ruest, who lives nearby.
Ruest sometimes saw a South Asian couple in their mid-50s, and a university-aged woman, entering and leaving the house, but said she never learned their names.
