To the editor:
August 17, 2014 marked the 20th anniversary of the brutal murder of eight-year-old Mindy Tran right here in our fair city of Kelowna.
This case remains unsolved and left a great many unanswered questions as to just why the investigators took this case in the direction they did.
The suspect, Shannon Murrin, that they chose to focus on was eventually acquitted by a jury that did not accept that he was indeed the one guilty of this heinous act, but police remain insistent that they targeted the right person.
I’m not at all sure the police focus was to actually find the murderer so much as to convince the public that’s what they were doing, so in that respect maybe they did indeed target the right stereotype in that it would appear that Mr. Murrin was a bit of an anti-authoritarian drifter, ill-equipped to defend himself and that made him an ideal candidate for investigators to utilize in the hopes of boosting their image and add to their numbers of “solved” cases.
Luckily the jury saw through their nefarious tactics.
The case was poorly handled, at the very least, and the Tran family was left with no sense of closure.
Let us not forget this young life that ended so brutally and left a family and a city to mourn forever, and a great many doubts clouding our confidence in our justice system.
Donna Campbell,
West Kelowna
