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Bacon shooting: Accused killer had known ties to slain gangster

McBride had $35 in his wallet, and a few credit cards on him at the time of the arrest.
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One of the men charged with the 2011 killing of Jonathan Bacon was known to police as an associate of the Dhak Group, long before the criminal organization took its gang war to Kelowna streets.

Const. Gary Hair — a Vancouver Police Department Constable temporarily transferred to the Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit for the Bacon investigation — testified Thursday about the day he arrested Jason McBride and offered some insight into the accused killer’s relationship with the higher echelons of B.C’s underworld.

Hair took McBride into custody in Toronto Feb. 22, 2013 after spotting him in the underground parking lot where he had been living.

McBride had $35 in his wallet, and a few credit cards on him at the time of the arrest.

Turning to McBride in the courtroom at the request of Crown counsel, he said that the accused killer looked very much as he did the day of his arrest, and on other occasions he’d run into him.

One of those occasions in particular highlighted the relationship McBride had to the Dhak Group, a criminal organization said to have called for the killing of Larry Amero and James Riach — two of the known gangsters who were travelling with Jonathan Bacon in Kelowna on the day he was killed.

In the summer of 2009, Hair was part of a uniform gang enforcement group when he went through the bar walk in gas town.

There he saw McBride with Gurmit Dhak.

“I saw him across the street from the club … they were close together, Mr. McBride was walking by,” he said. “It was a cordial conversation with Dhak… I don’t remember speaking to McBride.”

Hair knew definitively it was Dhak to whom he spoke, as they had a history “going back to the age of 10 or 12.”

Both of their families lived close to one another and growing up he saw him often.

When he became a police officer he developed a different understanding of the man known to many as “Gurm.”

Gurmit Dhak was the head of the Dhak group and the older brother of Sukh Dhak. He was murdered in 2010 in front of his family, and Crown counsel Dave Ruse said in opening arguments that killing is what set into motion the gangland slaying in Kelowna.

McBride, alongside Jujhar Khun-Khun, and Michael Jones, is on trial for one count of murder and four counts of attempted murder for the 2010 shooting outside Kelowna’s Delta Grand Hotel.