Edmonton mass murderer spared two kids in same house, police reveal

Authorities say the gunman responsible for one of the worst mass murders in Edmonton’s history spared the lives of two young children when he went on a killing spree earlier this week.

At a news conference Friday, police shed new light on the shooting rampage that left nine dead, including three generations of one family.

Police said that Lam on Monday had dropped an eight-month-old girl, a niece of his wife, Thuy Tien Truong, whom he had already killed, and their one-year-old son with a relative in Edmonton before shooting the eighth victim.

“There’s a very good possibility that those children were in the house … when the homicides took place,” Supt Mark Neufeld of the Edmonton police said at a press conference.

“And, yes, for whatever reason, the children were spared.”

The murder-suicide made the mass killing the deadliest in the history of the city. There were 27 homicides in Edmonton in 2013 and 27 in 2014 prior to the killings. The city has a population of 878,000.

All the victims were members of the city’s Vietnamese community.

While the police said the killings were a deliberate and planned act, they said Duong was simply in the wrong place when Lam arrived looking for another person, whom they did not name.

As police released results of autopsies that confirmed all the victims and Lam died of wounds from his stolen 9mm handgun, details emerged about the rocky relationship between Lam and his wife.

CBC News said his wife, Truong, asked an Alberta court for an emergency protection order in November 2012 when Lam threatened to kill her and her family upon learning that Elvis Lam was not his son. Elvis, eight, was among the victims.

The order was granted but was not renewed when it expired in January 2013.

The other child killed, three-year-old Valentina Nguyen, was the daughter of Truong’s 33-year-old sister, Thanh Ha Thi Truong.

Agencies/Canadajournal