Police say they have identified 90 “persons of interest” in their homicide investigation into the death of a 13-year-old girl whose body was found in a suburban Vancouver park last month.
Homicide investigators believe video footage from a community vigil and subsequent funeral for a slain 13-year-old girl could be key in solving a random act of violence that has shocked Vancouver this summer.
On Wednesday, the region's RCMP-led homicide unit said their unresolved investigation into the death of Marrisa Shen, whose body was found a month ago just after midnight in a popular Burnaby park, has yielded more than 90 "persons of interest," which includes anyone who was in the park when she disappeared the evening of July 18.
Investigators also have thousands of hours of surveillance footage from more than 60 nearby closed-circuit cameras that captured her walking the Vancouver suburb before she lost her life several hours later in Burnaby Central Park.
Now, police are asking any media outlets or people who filmed a large community vigil on July 22 and a smaller funeral for the teen July 28 to hand over their footage.
When asked if police believe the killer attended either event, Corporal Meghan Foster, spokeswoman for the Integrated Homicide Investigation Team, said "we don't want to rule out any possibilities."
She added there is "no specific person we're looking to obtain video from," but that more evidence will help investigators solve a crime they believe is random.
"Things unfold all the time, you process evidence, sometimes you get pieces here and there that you realize are relevant and it's worth following up on," she said of Wednesday's public appeal, noting her agency has received nearly 200 tips in the high-profile case.
Neil Boyd, a criminologist at Simon Fraser University who has studied homicides, said investigators are likely comparing footage from both events to see if "there's somebody who just doesn't fit." He said that would be harder to discern at the vigil, a public outpouring of grief that saw dozens of locals show up to remember the teen who was set to start high school this fall.
Police have not said how the teen was killed. After her death, Burnaby's RCMP detachment stepped up night-time patrols of the park and warned parents to be vigilant.
Random murders are uncommon, but often the hardest for detectives to solve, Prof. Boyd said.
"Most homicides, the person who committed the homicide is well known to the victim and police can almost immediately start looking in a number of avenues to determine who might be responsible," he said.
In B.C. in 2015, the latest data available from Statistics Canada, there were 95 homicides. Only 12 were random killings, just over 11 per cent.
That's about the same for the rest of the country: In Canada, 58 out of 451 solved murders in 2015 were carried out by strangers – 13 per cent.
And that figure is dropping. From 2005 to 2014, 17 per cent of the solved homicides were committed by strangers.
Nonetheless, the victims of these horrific crimes are not soon forgotten.
In 2010, 15-year-old Laura Szendrei died after a sexually motivated attack in Delta's Mackie Park. She was killed by Wyatt DeBruin, who was days shy of his 18th birthday when he committed the murder.
Mr. DeBruin was sentenced to life in prison. Before taking Laura's life, he had assaulted three other females in the same park.
In 2009, Wendy Ladner-Beaudry – a well-known physical-fitness advocate and a mother of two – was killed while running in Vancouver's Pacific Spirit Park. Her killing has been designated random and the case remains unsolved.
On the seventh anniversary last year of Ms. Ladner-Beaudry's death, her family offered a $30,000 reward for information that could lead to the arrest of the killer.
Mike Hager