A Bullet Crossed a Block in Burnaby and Found an 85-Year-Old in Bed

No one was hurt. That was the first assessment on the street in Burnaby in the early hours of August 30, and it was wrong by about a block and one life. Officers had answered reports of shots fired shortly after 1:30 a.m. near 18th Avenue and Humphries Avenue, found a scene already emptied of a suspect vehicle, and found no injured person there. ^{21 23} Roughly 14 hours later, in a third-floor bedroom about a block away, 85-year-old Chang Yong Cho was found dead of a gunshot wound. ^{21 25}

That contradiction — an empty shooting scene and a fatal wound behind a closed apartment door — is now the center of a homicide investigation in British Columbia’s Lower Mainland. Cho, described in the broadcast account as a grandfather, was inside his apartment in the 7400-block of Kingsway when a round fired from that earlier exchange reached him. ¹ Officers discovered him at around 4 p.m. on August 30 during a wellness check, after family or others raised concern that something was wrong inside the home. ^{21 25} Investigators concluded the fatal shot had traveled from the 18th Avenue and Humphries Avenue area into his bedroom. ^{21 23}

Police are explicit about what this was not. The Integrated Homicide Investigation Team, which took the file from Burnaby RCMP, attributes the gunfire to a personal dispute among youths believed to be from the Lower Mainland, not to a gang or drug confrontation. ^{21 22 23} Cho had no connection to the people involved and no role in the dispute. ^{21 25} In the language homicide investigators reserve for collateral deaths, he was an innocent victim, killed in his own home by a stray bullet. ^{21 25}

The name and photograph were held for more than a week while investigators worked the early forensics and canvass. On September 8, IHIT identified the victim as Chang Yong Cho and released a handout photo, asking for the public’s help. ^{21 25} The timing matters because it marks the shift from a shots-fired file with no reported injuries to a homicide appeal aimed at a very specific audience: the young people who were there, or who know what happened in the minutes around the shooting. ^{23 25}

What the investigators said in public was unusually emotional. IHIT Sgt. Freda Fong called the death heartbreaking and tragic, saying Cho was simply in his home when his life was suddenly taken and that the Cho family deserves answers. ^{22 23} Burnaby RCMP Cpl. Mike Kalanj called it every first responder’s nightmare and said Cho was known as a lovely person in the community. ^{22 25} The funeral was listed for September 14 at Living Hope Church in Surrey. ¹

On the question of who fired, police have not named a suspect and have not publicly confirmed recovery of a firearm. ^{23 25} What they say they do have is a group: investigators say they have identified a group of youths they believe were either involved in or have knowledge of the shooting and are working to determine each person’s role. ^{21 23} That phrasing is deliberate. It stops short of accusing every person in the circle of pulling a trigger, while making clear that silence from the circle is now the obstacle. ²³

Hence the directness of the appeal. Police are urging those young people to come forward and speak with investigators, and they are speaking past them to their parents: if you believe your child has information, encourage that child to do the right thing. ^{21 23 25} Fong said the group knows police want to talk to them. ²³ It is a public pressure campaign built on the assumption that the dispute was personal, local, and witnessed — that someone drove there with someone else, someone talked afterward, someone kept a video or a message. ²³

Investigators are also rebuilding the street itself. They are seeking witnesses and dashcam or closed-circuit television footage from the 18th Avenue and Humphries Avenue area between 12:30 a.m. and 2 a.m. on August 30. ^{21 25} Tips can go to the IHIT information line at 1-877-551-IHIT (4448) or ihitinfo@rcmp-grc.gc.ca. ^{21 25} The narrow window underscores how much may turn on seconds: which car left which way, who was standing where when the rounds were fired, and how a bullet on that trajectory could cross more than a block and enter a bedroom. ²¹

Fourteen hours is the detail that will haunt this case. Between the gunfire and the wellness check, no one knew a stray round had found its mark, and no medical response was possible. ^{21 25} That gap does not change criminal liability, but it explains the particular grief in the investigators’ language — a man alone in his apartment, a family learning after the fact that a dispute he never heard had already decided his fate. ²²