The Last Gang in Town

by Chapman, Aaron;

  It was the first time in his seven years with the police department that Campbell had fired his gun on the job. “Just as I got out of the front of the car … a shot went off near my ear,” says Brian Honeybourn. “I was about fifteen feet away from Bruce. I saw the flash, and I saw him go down.” Thinking that Campbell had been hit, Honeybourn took out his gun. Kajander and Battcock also heard the shot but kept chasing after the men running into the carport. It was dark, so they couldn’t determine the ages of those running, though Battcock thought they looked like young men in their late teens.

  On the second storey of the Prince Edward Manor, Richard Underwood was just getting into bed when he heard what sounded like a group of people running below his window—and then he heard the first shot. Underwood had experience with guns and hunting rifles and knew the different sounds certain firearms make. He immediately recognized the sound of a small-calibre policeman’s pistol. Looking out the window, he saw the flashing police lights and heard his neighbour on the floor above him shout, “There’s a kid running across the street there!”

  Fifteen-year-old Dorothy Bridgman had just gone to bed in the third-storey suite above Underwood’s when she heard someone yelling “Halt!” or “Stop!” Then she heard a shot, which also woke her mother, and they both got out of their beds.

  Police photo at the location of the Danny Teece shooting.

  PHOTO: Vancouver Police Department, 72-6402_6

  When he heard the first shot, “I thought, These crazy fuckers are shooting at us,” says Gary Blackburn. He’d heard similar shots before when police, on raids in Clark Park, had fired warning shots, but says that, “anytime you heard that, you just wanted to run faster. I had no doubt they were shooting directly at us.”

  Melo and Wadsworth had already climbed over a concrete block wall between two apartment buildings, and Blackburn made it over next. “My heart was racing so fast, and once I got over, I ran to the other side of the street,” says Blackburn.

  Battcock was trailing after Kajander as they ran into the carport. Danny Teece was halfway over the wall when Brian Honeybourn reached him. “I got hold of him by the scruff before he went over and tried to drag him back. He spun around and grabbed the barrel of the gun in my right hand. We struggled for a moment. I had my finger on the trigger, and it went off.” The bullet flashed with a crack out of the .38 Smith and Wesson revolver. It left the barrel of the gun at nearly 800 feet per second, burning a hole through the sleeve of Teece’s red mack jacket, entering his wrist, and scorching a path up Teece’s arm before passing out of his neck.

  “I yelled at Teece, ‘Are you hit? Are you hit?’” Honeybourn says. “I looked, and I had blood all over my hands.”

  Teece gasped and fell to the ground on his back.

  Kajander, who had been climbing over the wall when the gun went off, felt the bullet whiz past him, but continued to chase the thieves who had already made it over the wall. He ran out to an empty street; there was no sign of the other three men from the car. “So I ran back and found Brian, who said, ‘I shot him. I shot him!’” Kajander recalls. “He was very upset.”

  Teece lay semi-conscious on the ground. Battcock, muddy from slipping when he’d landed on the other side of the wall in the unsuccessful chase, heard Honeybourn shout, “For Chrissake, call an ambulance!” Although Mount Saint Joseph Hospital was just steps away at the end of the alley on Prince Edward Street, it did not have a twenty-four-hour emergency unit. As neighbours in their bed clothes began to come out to their balconies and peer from behind windows, they saw an ambulance appear just a few short minutes after Teece had been shot, which then rushed him to Vancouver General Hospital. Meanwhile, police backup units arrived on scene to begin a wide-area search for the men who had escaped. Kajander looked around the immediate area with his flashlight to see if a gun had been dropped. Both he and Battcock were certain they had heard not two shots, but three—the shot from Campbell, Honeybourn’s shot during the struggle with Teece, and an initial gunshot, one they heard when they first stepped from the vehicle, loud and close enough that Kajander crouched down when he heard it. Blackburn and the other Clark Park gang members insist they did not have a gun with them that night, but Kajander still refuses to believe this. “I’m certain it wasn’t a car backfiring, and to this day, I believe the guys in the car had a gun with them,” he says.

  Escaping from the alleyway and the police, Gary Blackburn hid in the shadow of a house. Alone in the darkness of some bushes for what seemed like hours, he tried to peer through them to see if the streets were clear, and wondered if Melo and Wadsworth had gotten away. “Every time I’d get up to leave, I’d hear a whistle or someone call ‘Check over here,’ but I couldn’t see anything,” he says. “Then it would get very quiet. It was spooky.”

  Blackburn saw flashlights coming toward the bushes, and then the light swing over his head. “The next thing I heard was, ‘Don’t move or I’ll blow your head off.’ They had a gun at my head,” he says. As he looked up, Blackburn saw that the hands of the cop holding the gun were shaking. After they handcuffed and put him in the back of a patrol car, police questioned him about where he’d been earlier in the night, and if he’d been in the stolen car. “I told them I didn’t know what they were talking about and that I’d passed out in the yard walking home from the Biltmore, but they kept wanting to know who I’d been with.”

  They drove Blackburn to the alley where the abandoned stolen Chevrolet still sat. Blackburn recalls there were fire trucks and ambulances everywhere. “With my handcuffs on, they pulled my arms up, which hurt like hell, as they pulled me out of the car. All these TV cameras caught me being taken out. I must have looked like a wild animal in pain like that. I know my parents later saw it on TV. It felt like the police were making a big show of it, like, ‘Here we go, look at him, we caught him!’ They took me down to the police station lockup.” At the jail, Blackburn half expected that he’d be interrogated or beaten. Unaware of what had happened to Teece, he nevertheless recognized that the mood at the station seemed more tense than usual.

  Meanwhile, VPD Corporal Calvin Reynolds arrived on scene to escort constables Honeybourn and Campbell to Vancouver General Hospital where they stopped to check on Teece. “I saw the ambulance attendants walk out of the building shaking their heads. I knew then that Teece had died,” Honeybourn recalls.

  The men next headed to the Main Street police station where Reynolds took Honeybourn’s and Campbell’s guns for evidence—standard procedure in cases of officer-involved shootings. Reynolds noted that a single round had been fired from each revolver. Honeybourn was taken to the homicide department office on the third floor of the station, where he was interviewed by detectives Robert Desmarais and Sam Andrews. In a small room, he hand-wrote a witness statement and was questioned for forty-five minutes. Amongst colleagues, he believed he didn’t need legal representation. “I didn’t have a lawyer. I just told them the truth.”

  Gary Blackburn was also sitting in a small room. “When they put me in a cell, that’s when they told me somebody had been shot,” he says. “The first person I saw in the police station was Brian Honeybourn. He wouldn’t look at me, he turned away. I knew Brian didn’t like me—we used to deal with him when he was a beat cop in our neighbourhood. But I didn’t know that he was one of the police who’d just been at the scene, and I didn’t know what was going on.”

  Paul Melo was brought in next. Police had found him hiding under a car near the scene and brought him to the station. As he walked past Blackburn, Melo glanced at him, but said nothing. If Melo knew anything, he was keeping quiet.

  “Then there was this beat cop we used to call ‘Flashlight’ who came by my cell,” says Blackburn. “He carried a big mag flashlight, but he had it taped up so if he hit you with it, it wouldn’t break. He came by my cell laughing, saying that one of us had been shot. He was trying to intimidate me, and said, ‘Your friend’s dead. Next time we’re going to get you!’ I thought they were playing ga
mes. So I swore at him and called him a liar and an asshole. I thought, Why would he even say that? And I told him to get the fuck away from me.”

  Blackburn got out of jail the next day and was not charged, though he believed that charges for the car and TV theft were pending. But at least he was free. His mother came to pick him up. “When I got in the car, I saw the look on her face. She told me that Danny had been shot and killed. It was all over the news. I screamed, thinking, They finally got what they wished for.”

  55 “Stokes Recalls the Days of Street Justice,” Vancouver Sun, October 7, 1975, 21.

  ELEVEN: THE WRONG MAN

  The morning after the shooting, the city awoke to news bulletins that an unnamed seventeen-year-old Vancouver youth had been shot and killed by Vancouver police after a three-hour-long police stakeout of a stolen car. While graveyard-shift news reporters monitoring police scanners had quickly arrived on the scene in the morning, more newspaper and radio reporters and TV camera operators flocked to the 300-block of East 14th to interview neighbours and take film footage. Police investigators were busy processing the scene for evidence. But before the media arrived in full force, Alexander Beaton, a forensic analyst and chemist with the VPD, found the bullet that had exited Teece’s neck. It lay on the ground behind the Prince Edward Manor apartments below a blood-spattered dryer vent that it had hit before it fell to the ground.

  After giving his statement to supervisors, Brian Honeybourn left the station at five a.m., returned to his home in East Vancouver, and told his wife that they needed to pack their bags. They would head to the home of Honeybourn’s parents in Delta, a thirty-minute drive outside Vancouver. VPD superintendent Tom Herdman had told Honeybourn that he and his wife should vacate their residence in the wake of the shooting.

  Danny Teece’s death makes the headlines.

  SOURCE: Vancouver Sun

  The media attention was one concern, as reporters would soon discover who the VPD officer involved in the shooting was, and descend upon his home, though Honeybourn and the other three police officers were not immediately named to the press. Herdman’s greater concern was that, since Teece was a member of the Clark Park gang, there might be a violent retaliation for his death. Herdman ordered round-the-clock surveillance at the Honeybourn residence over the coming days, and officers stationed there were to be on the lookout for any suspicious activity. However, upon learning about Teece’s death, most of the gang were more stunned than immediately given to thoughts of revenge.

  Oakalla Prison, 1975.

  PHOTO: Dan Scott, Vancouver Sun

  Mark Owens woke up in Oakalla prison that morning to hear the news that there’d been a shooting in East Vancouver. “We didn’t know who it was, but word had gotten around that it was one of us [the Clark Park gang].” There were about fifteen Clark Park members in Oakalla then, along with a number of hangers-on. Owens recalls that that morning the prison guards removed him, Mouse Williamson, and others from their cells one by one and placed them on a single tier of the prison. Owens surmises that prison authorities hoped that, if news of Teece’s death did provoke a riot, at least they could contain it to a single section of the jail. “Once they got us all together, they told us that it was Danny who had been shot and killed. I guess they wanted to let us all know at the same time before anyone else said something.” Owens was shocked. Had it been Gerry Gavin, Wayne Angelucci, or one of the wilder men of the gang, it would still have been terrible news, but not as surprising. “Danny was a really laid-back guy. He was quiet. There were a lot of guys then who got into fights, but he wasn’t one of them.”

  Bradley Bennett was in the Salvation Army House of Concord, a correctional facility in Langley, BC, when he learned of Teece’s death and was also shocked. Like Mac Ryan, Rick Stuart, and others in the Clark Park scene, he blamed Teece’s death on the police “goon squad.” “Everything that the goon squad had been doing culminated in Danny’s death,” says Bennett. “Danny Teece was a harmless kid. He had a bad gambling problem and was gullible. Wadsworth was the biggest criminal of the bunch because he’d been in and out of jail so many times. Danny had just come along for the ride.”

  Newspapers in 1972 ran the only available photo of Danny Teece, taken two years earlier when he was fifteen.

  SOURCE: Vancouver Sun

  Bennett believed that Teece’s death was the result of the H-Squad finally making good on its threats; this was a widely held reaction in the East End. That Brian Honeybourn was not in the H-Squad and that the squad itself had disbanded a month earlier than the shooting were immaterial. Many East Vancouver residents, whether they were anti-police, sympathetic to Teece’s family, or previously undecided, were now left to reconsider the message of the Clark Park Freedom Rally.

  The next day, November 29, police named seventeen-year-old Daniel Wilfred Teece as the victim in the shooting. They revealed that two or three shots had been fired, but beyond naming Battcock, Campbell, Honeybourn, and Kajander as the officers on the scene, police did not specify which officers had fired and offered no further details.

  Police were guarded in releasing information; this was, and is, typical protocol for an investigation that has not yet been concluded. To perhaps stem public concern that police had targeted Teece, Deputy Chief of Police Tom Stokes stated in the press conference that the incident appeared to be an accidental shooting. “It’s not as bad as it may look now,” Stokes said. “From the evidence, this was no case of drawing a bead on a man and pulling the trigger,” and he declined to elaborate further on his statement, concluding that full details wouldn’t be released until an inquest was held.56

  After Stokes’ press conference, newspapers ran the most recent available photo of Danny Teece—a school yearbook photo taken two years earlier when he was fifteen. Teece looked young to begin with, but his baby-faced looks at fifteen made him appear even younger. It was nearly unimaginable, in the public’s perception, that such a boy could have been a criminal; he looked like any young teenager in a schoolyard on the way to class.

  The day of the press conference, Arthur Teece, Danny’s father, was interviewed for the CBC television news. Visibly shaken, he stated that he still hadn’t been given the details of what had happened to his son. When the reporter inquired if Danny had ever been involved with violent crime, Teece replied that he had not seen his son in three weeks and confessed that Danny was no angel. “Stupidity,” he explained. “Getting in trouble, stealing cars, breaking and entering.” In a voice breaking with emotion, he stressed, “But not anything with violence … I don’t care if he robbed a bank, there was no need for this.”57

  In the initial days after the incident, the public knew less than Danny’s father, and there was a sense that the police must have been completely at fault; details unknown, conjecture took over. With a Vancouver civic election scheduled for December 13, the subject of the shooting was raised during an all-candidates meeting at the Fraserview Community Centre, when Non-Partisan Association candidate Russell Fraser told those gathered—although he had no knowledge of the facts—that police had fired “all over the darned place.” Fraser condemned the action, saying that, “They [the police] would have caught them eventually.”58

  That day, Robert Wadsworth also turned himself in to police in a dramatic fashion. He’d first done a taped interview, where he related the events of that evening to the Vancouver Sun, which would lead to a front-page news story. He stated that he had not heard a police warning, nor had officers identified themselves as police. Immediately after the interview, the Sun noted that Wadsworth was escorted to the Main Street police station.

  Other media were not above exaggeration or incorrect reporting—especially the local alternative press. The most egregious example appeared in an issue of The Grape, which ran the inflammatory headline, “Was Danny Murdered?” The article went on to state: “Danny Teece, aged seventeen, is dead. But at this point there is precious little else about his death at the hands of Vancouver police that is clear
…” The author incorrectly reported that “Danny Teece was hit from behind on the left side of the neck.” The Grape further noted that, “Today, the atmosphere in [Clark Park] is tense and sombre—and angry,” quoting one unnamed Clark Park gang member as saying, “We ain’t saints, but we sure ain’t killers.”59 The unnamed source told the reporter that they had been involved in a variety of hassles with the police and the courts since the Rolling Stones concert, when a number of police had been injured. The Grape’s report did much to spread rumours in the East End that police had shot Teece in the back while he was running away, which many people wrongly believe to this day.

  Meanwhile, temporarily taken off duty, Brian Honeybourn remained at his parents’ house in Delta. “I was in shock and in a haze for a few days when my lawyer called me and said that we had to meet down at the police station,” he says. Honeybourn’s lawyer, Jack McGivern, and his police-union appointed counsel, George Murray, joined him there. Honeybourn returned to the homicide office where he’d previously made his official statement on the night of the shooting, and there he unexpectedly learned that he would be charged with criminal negligence causing death.

  Initially, the case had been scheduled to go to a coroner’s inquest, but on the night before the inquest, coroner Glen MacDonald received a telegram from new Attorney General Alex MacDonald (no relation) instructing him to call it off. Instead, a preliminary inquiry would take place to see if there was enough evidence to merit a trial. While it was standard procedure for the city prosecutor to take over and the inquest be suspended if criminal charges were filed during the coroner’s proceedings, it was less common that the order to call off the inquest come directly from the attorney general’s office. In addition, an inspector from the Ministry of Justice, Allan Nichols, was appointed to act as an observer during the inquiry, “to look at and attend the inquest on behalf of the attorney general.”