The latest bout of the city's underworld violence endangered the lives of a dumbfounded Quentin Avenue resident and his children Monday night.
Derek Desjarlais was doing homework at his basement apartment's dinner table, preparing for his next CNC Business Administration class around midnight on Monday as his kids, three and five, slept in the next room.
Suddenly cracking glass passed over his head, which Desjarlais thought was a light bulb popping. Then more shattered glass passed by.
That's when instinct kicked in and he hit the floor and discovered the drawn blinds contained a spray of window shrapnel, realizing bullets were searing through his apartment. Five shots in total blasted through his three ground-level windows.
"I was on the floor and got to the phone, tried to control my breathing, and headed for my kids," he said.
The children slept through the whole incident. The only significant casualty in the spree was a bag of Chewy Chips Ahoy cookies, but two of the shots missed Desjarlais's head by a couple of feet each, and the children's bedroom was in the direct path of the first bullet that thankfully didn't make it that far.
Police were on the scene in moments and quickly determined that the shots were likely intended for a temporary resident visiting in an adjacent unit. The assailants fired into the wrong apartment.
"There are indications another apartment nearby was also of interest to the shooter, and two vehicles in the parking lot had their windows smashed out," said Prince George RCMP spokesman Cpl. Craig Douglass.
The male owner of those vehicles was vacuuming up the glass in the parking lot when The Citizen arrived on-scene. He drove off so fast to evade questions the vacuum was dropped on the ground still running.
"Both vehicles in a parking lot of 30-or-so vehicles were registered to the same one person, and that same person was residing in the other apartment that may have been targeted. It makes the odds pretty astronomical in favour of this probably being a targeted act of violence towards an individual known to the shooter, but they made a mistake shooting into the apartment," Douglass said.
The apartment building sits in the 4200 block of Quentin Avenue near the intersection of 5th Avenue and Tabor Boulevard. It has a trim Tudor-style theme with closely mown grass, orange maple leaves falling from the decorative trees and a children's playground in the neatly groomed park across the street. Desjarlais moved in only six weeks ago expecting he and his kids would be in a family-friendly neighbourhood. Now he is questioning if he should stay.
"I'd tell them [the assailant or assailants] to think before you act, but there was no thought process involved in this," the young father said. "If you want to do your nasty business, do it somewhere else, don't bring it into people's neighbourhoods."
If anyone has any information about this attack, please contact the Prince George RCMP at (250)561-3300 or anonymously contact Crime Stoppers at 1(800)222-TIPS (8477), online at www.pgcrimestoppers.bc.ca, or Text-A-Tip to CRIMES using keyword "pgtips".
