Prince George RCMP is investigating the second murder of a woman in the city in less than two weeks.
Both women were found dead in apartments between midnight and 1am
On Tuesday, RCMP Cpl Jennifer Cooper said officers found a woman dead at a home in Sunrise Valley Mobile Home Park after responding to a report of a disturbance.
Unmarked police vehicles blocked both ends of an apartment block at the RV park. RCMP cruisers and uniformed investigators could be seen on an icy road where several vehicles were taped.
According to Cooper, Major Crimes Unit investigators are working to identify two women who were seen leaving the residence after midnight.
Ten days earlier, on February 4, another woman was found dead at her home at Millar Addition on 17th Avenue at Fir Street, just a few doors down from the popular Lheidli T’enneh Memorial Park, in a quiet residential area .
Last week, RCMP cruisers parked outside the little yellow house for six days investigating what they called a “suspicious death.”
Cooper said the death has since been determined to be a homicide, but “due to the privacy of the deceased” no details would be released.
“It’s too early in the investigation to make any connections between the two deaths,” Cooper told CBC News on Tuesday. “Nothing is obvious.”
“Definitely not the kind of news we would like to receive,” Prince George Mayor Simon Yu told CBC News. “Is this just a one-off occurrence or some kind of trend? That definitely didn’t help the city’s image.”
Yu said his condolences go out to the women’s families. “But it’s not just family. It’s the community as a whole.”
According to the RCMP, Prince George recorded six murders in 2022 and 2021, one murder in 2020 and two in 2019.
A report presented to Prince George’s Council in December 2022 in support of an increase in police funding said the RCMP is dealing with more crime in Prince George than in almost any other city in the province.
One of the report’s authors, Surrey-based criminologist Curt Griffiths of Simon Fraser University, told local councilors that the city’s crime problem was not an issue of perception versus reality.
“People are afraid of crime because they should be,” he said.
