Saturday March 6, 2021 | LANGFORD, BC [Updated Saturday March 6 at 3 pm | Updated Sunday March 7, 2021 – the highway has reopened | Update March 9, 2021 re shooting victim] | RCMP File 2021-4076
by Mary P Brooke, editor | Island Social Trends
As of around 11:30 am this morning, Highway 14 (Sooke Road) is closed to through-traffic at the intersection of West Shore Parkway. The highway has been closed in both directions in the area from late Friday night through Saturday morning due to a fatal shooting in the 4600-block of Kangaroo Road near Sooke Road (Highway 14).
Last night at 9 pm a 37-year-old man was found deceased in what is believed to be a targeted shooting, according to police. The victim was known to police. [The man found dead in Metchosin on March 5 was identified on March 9 as 37-year-old Shane Wilson. The Vancouver Island Integrated Major Crime Unit, along with the BC Coroners Service, continues to investigate.]
Highway closed for extended period:
As per DriveBC (file DBC-26713) at noon today, the highway remains closed between Impala Road and Humpback Road in the four-lane stretch of the highway just beyond Langford, in Metchosin.
Today during a live media session at 1 pm at the West Shore RCMP detachment in Langford, Cst Alex Bérubé, Media Relations Officer, said that police would be looking for ‘any clues’ and querying local residents for things that “might seem normal to them but are meaningful to police”.
The highway closure started at 9 pm last night (after the shooting) and today a detour is redirecting traffic onto either West Shore Parkway or back into Langford on Sooke Road.
This is a much longer closure than for most traffic accidents or weather-related incicents.
An extended closure is a huge inconvenience for anyone hoping to have gone to Sooke or left Sooke to come to Victoria today. Today’s traffic blockage on a dry sunny Saturday afternoon shows still how vulnerable the Sooke economy is to dead-stop blockages of traffic on Highway 14 (the one route in-and-out for the town that now boasts a population of around 14,000).
One police officer was on-scene at 12:15 pm, but said on site that they still didn’t know when the road would be open again. There was one traffic-control person and the one West Shore RCMP officer at the intersection in today’s noon hour.
Anyone urgently hoping to get to Sooke can take Happy Valley Road as a detour into/through Metchosin, or the other way, from Sooke, along Gillespie Road to get back into Langford and Greater Victoria. Detour info on DriveBC. The next Drive BC update scheduled for 1:30 pm.
The BC Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure is fully underway with improvements to an accident-prone section of Highway 14 between Connie Road and Glinz Road, but today’s incident shows other vulnerabilities for Sooke of being dependent on one road access route for residents, services and visitors.
