By Dan Ferguson - Langley Times

The sporty new white Cadillac CTS was travelling through the intersection of 148 Street and 96 Avenue at about 10:30 Monday morning. Nicole Marie Alemy, 23, was at the wheel. Her four-year-old son was in a rear child car seat.

The quiet neighbourhood was familiar territory to the young White Rock mother. On one side of the street was Surrey’s Green Timbers Park, on the other, rows of well-maintained homes.

The former Nikki Medved grew up not far from here, attending Guildford Park Secondary school where she was one of the popular kids, a pretty, petite girl remembered by one acquaintance as a little loud and a bit wild, but good-hearted.

At a young age, she became a mother twice. Nicole’s first child, a six-year-old daughter, is old enough to go to school.

The acquaintance (who asked not to be named) described Alemy as a responsible parent who took care of her children, doing “mom things” like arranging play dates for them with other kids and their parents.

She had a weakness for “bad boy” relationships, but she was never directly involved in anything remotely criminal, the acquaintance insisted.

“She might have been a friend of a friend (who had gang ties), or a girlfriend,” but nothing more, the acquaintance said.

The Cadillac was registered to the woman’s husband, said Integrated Homicide Investigation Team spokesman Cpl. Dale Carr.

As the car passed through the intersection, there was a sound that workers at a nearby construction site thought was fireworks going off.

The car slowed down and started drifting across the centre line into oncoming traffic. It was heading straight at a pickup truck driven by Surrey trucker Tracy Flamand.

Flamand threw his Ford F250 into reverse. As the Cadillac went by, he saw a panicked little boy. Their eyes met. The child was crying.

Then Flamand saw Alemy slumped at the wheel. He thought she had passed out from a seizure.

Then he noticed the window on the driver’s side had been shot out.

“That can’t be any good,” he thought.

Flamand jumped out of his truck and ran to the still-moving Cadillac. He couldn’t reach the shifter to stop it, so he started steering it through the window, trying to bring it to rest against a utility pole, but missing.

By then a second man had joined the rescue attempt.

“Hit the tree, hit the tree,” the second man called out. “It’ll stop at the tree.”

Flamand brought the car to rest against some bushes in one of the driveways.

The second man turned out to be a doctor, who couldn’t find a pulse on the victim. When the physician raised Alemy’s shirt, he discovered three bullet wounds in her side.

She may have also have been wounded in the head.

Flamand said Alemy’s last act was to try to stop the car from crashing.

“She had her foot on the brake.”

There were several bullet holes in the Cadillac on the driver’s side, and as many as 20 shots had been fired.

Police arrived within minutes, with dozens of patrol cars and officers flooding the area.

The traumatized child was physically unharmed.

Investigators covered the car under a tarp and cordoned off the street.

Carr called the shooting “beyond comprehension.”

“We’ve talked about these daytime shootings being brazen, we’ve talked about them crossing the line (by) doing them at shopping malls, now they’re doing them while small children are in the vehicle,” Carr said.

“I don’t know what kind of idiot would do something like this.”

He reiterated his comments at a news conference in Langley Tuesday morning, led by federal Public Safety Minister Peter Van Loan. Carr said that the child has been handed over to the Ministry of Children and Family Development, because of concerns for his safety. Carr said that Alemy’s husband is co-operating with police.
 
Surrey Mayor Dianne Watts was mortified when she heard of the shooting, particularly because of the innocent child in the back seat.

“When you have a four-year-old child in a car, witnessing that kind of violence, it is just absolutely over the top,” Watts said.

“You can see by their actions, they don’t care who is in their way,” she said. “They’re carrying on business as usual.”

Watts favours the ambitious undertaking by the province last week, which announced new police, prosecutors and more jails.

But she said the federal government can no longer sit idle while violence escalates.

“The feds need to step up to the plate. We need those officers now,” Watts said.

“(Perhaps) second them from other areas, whatever it takes.”

She said that IHIT could add 100 more officers immediately to its 70-member team.

“Given what’s gone on over the past couple of weeks, we need an influx of officers,” Watts said, adding the RCMP has a huge contingent of homicide detectives nationally.

At the press conference, victims’ advocates Steve Brown of Abbotsford and Sunil and Eileen Mohan of Surrey were present. Brown’s brother-in-law Ed Schellenberg and the Mohans’ son Chris were innocent victims in the slaying of six people in a Whalley apartment in October, 2007.

Brown said they will continue to press both Ottawa and Victoria to fight gang violence by every means possible.

“Three weeks ago, (Attorney General) Wally Oppal said bail was working well. Now he’s going to Ottawa (asking for changes). Nothing has changed — there is plea bargaining, conditional sentences — and Mr. Oppal represents that system.”

“There is a series of issues around the administration of justice in B.C.,” he said.

Langley MP Mark Warawa said Tuesday’s event highlighted how innocent people are left powerless by the gang violence that is sweeping the Lower Mainland.

“We need to stand together against growing gang violence,” he said. “There are innocent victims being killed.”