A Vancouver Police Department patch is seen in Vancouver on Saturday, Jan. 9, 2021. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck
Vancouver police say a man has been arrested after a pair of “unprovoked stranger attacks” in the city’s downtown that left one man dead and severed another victim’s hand.
Chief Constable Adam Palmer says police believe the early morning attacks near the Queen Elizabeth Theatre were “completely random,” and that such incidents “shake our collective sense of comfort and safety.”
Police say in a news release that officers responded to a call at 7:38 a.m. about a man who had been attacked near Cathedral Square, at Richards and Dunsmuir streets.
They say they found a man in his 50s with a severed hand who had been attacked with a knife and was also bleeding from the head.
Officers say that eight minutes later there was a call about an attack on a second man at West Georgia and Hamilton Street, where the theatre is located, and despite efforts to save his life, the victim died at the scene.
Just after 9 a.m. a suspect was seen on Habitat Island, near the Olympic Village, and a 34-year-old White Rock man was arrested.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 4, 2024.
