A Surrey man was expected to be sentenced Monday for manslaughter for a drive-by shooting in Surrey in 2006, but didn’t appear in court because of a medical crisis.
Fushpinder Singh Brar, 32, has pleaded guilty to manslaughter using a firearm and was set to appear in B.C. Supreme Court in New Westminster on Monday for the Oct. 14, 2006 drive-by shooting in Whalley of Mahdi Halane, who was rendered a quadriplegic until his death six years later at age 24.
Brar’s lawyer, Phil Rankin, told Justice John Harvey on Monday that he was told by his client’s family about an hour before the 2 p.m. sentencing that he had been taken to hospital for a “suspected heart attack or heart trouble.”
The matter was set over to Dec. 7, to fix a date for the sentencing hearing, which was expected to take about two hours. Sheryl Wagner is the Crown prosecutor.
Mahdi Halane, an 18-year-old Queen Elizabeth Secondary grad, was out celebrating a friend’s birthday when he and his pals came across another group of friends who’d been in a fight at the Chevron gas station at 96th Avenue and 128th Street in Cedar Hills.
Police said the fight started after a man from another group spat and some of his spittle hit the pant leg of one of Halane’s friends.
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Halane was down the street, in a different car, and had nothing to do with the gas station incident. He apparently looked up from his front passenger seat, as bullets flew from a passing car, and was hit in the neck, severing his spinal cord and rendering him quadriplegic until he died of kidney failure on March 25, 2012, at the age of 24.
“For six years he was paralyzed, and he died,” his father, Osman Halane said in 2014, contemplating the horror of his son’s fate. “A lot of disaster we passed, and nightmare.”
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Nine years after the shooting, the Surrey RCMP arrested Brar, age 30 at the time, and he was charged with manslaughter. Sergeant Mike Hall, in charge of Surrey RCMP’s Unsolved Homicides Unit at the time, had been on the case since the night of the shooting and said police believe Halane was an innocent victim.
The victim’s sister, Juweria Halane, said that before the shooting her brother was a tall, athletic young man who loved basketball. Filled with life, he was a practical joker who easily made friends.
Asked Monday if she had any comment on Monday’s delay, she replied, “Other than the family being disappointed? That’s about it.”
Halane’s mother Safia and dad Osman brought their five children to Canada in 1997, from war-torn Somalia, hoping for a prosperous future for them here.
Below see a Surrey RCMP photo of the car Halane was shot in.
tom.zytaruk@surreynowleader.com
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