SURREY, B.C. – Hundreds of people, including politicians and police, have rallied in suburban Surrey to protest gang violence in Metro Vancouver.
The region has been reeling from more than a dozen shootings in the past few weeks – several of them deadly.
Twenty-year-old rally organizer Trevor Loke says the goal of the event was to show gangs that people are not afraid.
The rally drew politicians including Surrey Mayor Diane Watts and local MP Dona Cadman, whose own son was killed in a random attack in 1992 and who with her late husband Chuck lobbied for victims rights.
Eileen Mohan, whose son Chris was among six people murdered in a gang-style massacre in a Surrey apartment in 2007, says the public are fed up with the brazen violence.
She says most sentences handed out for violent offences don’t fit the crime and that judges must realize violent offenders need to be behind bars.
