A local prolific offender has now been charged with the Oct. 22, 2019 murder of Keith Baldwin in the downtown Chilliwack area.
Owen Dale Charpentier was already well-known to Chilliwack RCMP, mostly for property crimes and was himself the victim of an alleged stabbing in December 2018.
• READ MORE: Chilliwack prolific offender charged with stabbing another prolific offender
Keith Baldwin was shot in the head in the early hours of Oct. 22, 2019 in area of Yale Road and Fletcher Street in downtown Chilliwack.
When the 27-year-old was found by a security guard, he was alone. He wasn’t dead, but he then kept alive on life support for a short period of time so that friends and family could say goodbye.
Baldwin was described by the RCMP as “known to police,” but it was a term friends and family objected to because he had mostly turned his life around.
• READ MORE: Wife of Chilliwack homicide victim says he was more than ‘known to police’
Soon after the killing, Charpentier’s name was circulated as rumoured to be the person who killed Baldwin. An arrest was made last month and Charpentier appeared in Surrey provincial court on May 19 and is next due in court on June 2.
Charpentier is also charged with robbery and kidnapping for an alleged incident six days before the Baldwin homicide. He and his co-accused Alexis Kasey Nicole Neill are next due in court on that file on June 2. That day is also his next scheduled court appearance on the homicide.
Three weeks after Keith Baldwin was killed in Chilliwack, on Nov. 11, 2019, his brother Andrew was killed in Surrey. In January, two men were charged with second-degree murder, Jason Robert James Bottomley and Jagpal Singh Hothi. On May 20, a third man, Jasman Basran of Surrey, was arrested and charged with accessory after the fact to murder.
The RCMP’s Integrated Homicide Investigation Team (IHIT) has not found any link between the two killings.
• READ MORE: IHIT says charges laid in connection with Remembrance Day 2019 killing in Surrey
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