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June 11, 2010 Peachland, BC
Volume 06 | Number 23
Kelowna-Westside
An independent member broker
Photo Joanne Layh
The San Clemente home where a 16-year old girl was stabbed to death on June 2.
Community still reeling after senseless murder By Joanne Layh The Westside communities are still reeling a week after the fatal stabbing of a 16-year old girl at a house party on San Clemente Avenue on June 2. It doesn’t matter who you talk to in Peachland, everyone is still in disbelief that this could happen on a Wednesday night in such a quiet community. Exactly what happened and why, nobody knows, but one 16-year old Mount Boucherie student from West Kelowna is dead while another, the accused, faces charges of first degree Murder and
Assault with a Weapon and has been released on bail. What is known is that at approximately 9:30 p.m. on June 2, West Kelowna RCMP attended a house on San Clemente Avenue following a stabbing at a house party. The victim received emergency treatment from paramedics and was transported to Kelowna General Hospital, where she died as a result of her injuries. “People were under the influence of alcohol. There was clear evidence of that,” Const. Steve Holmes said. “There was a dispute. I know there was a verbal altercation
that preceded the incident and that there was an altercation between the accused and someone else right after this incident. That other person [a 17-year old girl] was injured with the weapon and that’s where the second charge [Assault with a Weapon] comes from.” Homicides in Peachland are very rare, and as far as local historians can recall, the stabbing on San Clemente is only the 7th murder that has happened in Peachland. Some of those homicides are chronicled in “Peachland: A Pictorial History of the First 100 Years,” a book edited by Richard Smith on the occasion
of Peachland’s centennial. According to Smith, the last homicide to happen in Peachland was on April 18, 2004, when two men were murdered in a shootout on Victoria Avenue. Prior to that, a shooting on Beach Avenue resulting from a domestic dispute took the life of one Peachland woman some years ago. One other homicide not mentioned in the history book is an incident that took place about twenty years ago. Don Wilson, retired Peachland Fire Chief and a member of the Peachland Historical Society, was working with the
ambulance service when he attended a house at the bottom of Princeton Avenue where he says a man had been murdered, though little information is known about what happened. The only other teen to be murdered in Peachland was a 15-year old Vancouver boy who was found in September of 1974 near the Ponderosa Golf Course, according to Smith. The body had been there for months when it was discovered and the case remains unsolved. The first recorded murder in Peachland’s history took place in March of 1912 on the
SS Okanagan. Two men had robbed a general store and post office in South Kelowna and were later arrested in Penticton. The men were being transported back to Kelowna on the SS Okanagan under police guard when one of the robbers, Boyd James, shot Provincial Police Constable Aston with a .22 revolver. The robbers escaped into Peachland and were later re-captured at Wilson’s Landing. With only 6 homicides in Peachland’s first 100 years, hopefully it will a very long time before the community has to experience something like this again.
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