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Inside South Surrey
Winger helped the Surrey Eagles celebrate their overtime win Saturday to move onto the second round of the playoffs. Next up, the Powell River Kings. Story on page 23.
Community
Actors, from left, John Perrotta, Jas Dhillon and Leana Yu will be spending the next six weeks living out a reality TV show behind glass walls in full view of the public in Surrey’s Central City Shopping Centre.
The reality show, being dubbed as the “world’s first real-time, e-drama,” is part of a marketing campaign for a new condominium development. See the full story on page 3. (Photo: MATT LAW)
Column
Savage attack should go to judge
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Delta man, 80, died weeks after being beaten with bats and nobody is being charged in his death ViewPoint Tom Zytaruk
S
omething stinks about the way that the Delta police and Crown prosecutors’ office have responded to the death of Gerald McDonald. The 80-year-old man died of a heart attack a couple of weeks after being savagely beaten with bats outside his home in North Delta. Not only is nobody being charged with murder or manslaughter –
despite the coroner having declared McDonald’s death a homicide – nobody is being charged with any crime related to the attack on this poor soul. One person – Gregory James Smithies, 51 – has been charged with assault with a weapon and possession of a weapon dangerous to public peace, for allegedly swinging a bat at the head of a neighbour who tried to intervene. McDonald’s assault was the climax of a pathetically banal disagreement over who had the right of way along the street in front of his house – a teenage couple who’d been out for a stroll, or the
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old man’s son David, who’d been out walking his dogs. As is all too common in this era of post-courtesy, this silly spat went from zero to 200 in a blink. The couple left, allegedly returned with the girl’s dad (of all people!) and metal bats, and all hell broke loose. Here’s how it went down, according to a neighbour who saw the whole bloody business unfold. Nikki Furber, who lived across the street, saw Gerald McDonald yelling at these people to get out of his yard. “One of the guys, I don’t know if it was the dad or the kid, started hitting the man with the bat, and then the two other girls started
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just booting him and everything,” Furber recalled. She said she heard “at least five to seven whacks on the back – crack, crack, crack – on the old man.” “I was yelling ‘Just stop, he’s an old man!’” Furber’s partner, Rick Moreau, came outside and headed toward her. “I could see somebody on the ground being swarmed,” he said. “He had blood all over him.” When his wife turned back toward their house, Moreau recalled, the eldest of the attackers swung the bat at her head, missing it by about four inches. see YES, BRUTAL › page 3
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Women with roots in Surrey have launched the Be Your Own Best Friend network as a way to connect South Asian women involved in business pursuits. Story on page 15.