Surrey father and son charged with murder found not guilty by judge

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Two Surrey men accused of killing an acquaintance by hitting him in the neck with a golf club were found not guilty of manslaughter after a British Columbia Supreme Court judge said their lawyers raised reasonable doubt about their guilt. .

Gurmail Singh Biring and his son, Daljeet Biring, were originally charged with the second-degree murder of Lakhwinder Bal, who was found in an alley behind a McDonald’s on August 19, 2018.

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The evidence linking the two men to the murder was circumstantial, Judge Terence Schultes wrote in his reasons for sentencing released this week.

The court heard that Daljeet Biring and Bal had had previous disputes. The Crown suggested security video showed both men traveling to and from the area of ​​the attack. DNA evidence was presented connecting Bal to a Biring family vehicle and possibly connecting the defendant to the gun. The Crown also suggested the couple’s conduct later demonstrated they were trying to avoid detection for the crime.

But the defense argued that the circumstantial evidence lacked the strength and reliability to support a conviction. A trial was held that lasted 26 days, from September 2022 to January 2023, during which video evidence was played, according to the ruling.

The assault on Bal occurred near 96th Avenue and 128th Street in an alley bordering the parking lot of a McDonald’s.

Balbir Sahl, a friend of the defendant, testified that he had known Bal for 10 years. He told the court that the victim was homeless, she was addicted to alcohol and crack cocaine and that, when she was drunk, she was aggressive and threatening.

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Sahl testified that Daljeet Biring told him the day Bal was killed that he was wearing a Band-Aid because Bal had stabbed him and stolen beer and money. On the afternoon of the murder, video evidence showed Daljeet Biring, Bal, Sahl and a fourth man in a confrontation, the court heard.

Bal was waving a board and a passerby said they were yelling at each other. Other witnesses, including McDonald’s employees, said they could hear two or three male voices shouting aggressively in Punjabi.

Two employees said they saw or heard an object, described by one as a “golf club broken in half” with blood, fly over the bushes toward the McDonald’s parking lot, the judge wrote.

A forensic pathologist testified that it was unclear what part of the golf iron Bal had been hit with, but police said it was likely the end of the broken shaft.

A McDonald’s customer testified that she saw Bal emerge from the alley, bleeding, saying “save me” in Punjabi before collapsing.

DNA samples showed that Bal’s DNA was found on the fabric inside the car the Birings were driving that night. But sufficient DNA information was missing to determine any finding about whose blood on the golf club was because there were mixed profiles, the court heard.

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The Crown’s theory was that the evidence was unlikely to have been gathered “for any reason other than their joint participation in the attack on Mr Bal” and to dismiss that “would require an impossible series of coincidences”.

The evidence included a recent dispute between Daljeet Biring and Bal in the same alley on the same day of the fatal assault, “Gurmail’s possession of a golf club with characteristics similar to the one used in the assault minutes before it occurred,” the Bal’s DNA on Birings’ car, the disappearance of the car from his house after the night of the attack and his delay in returning home until the next day, according to the sentence.

The defendants were also dressed in different clothing when they returned home the next day and took steps to hide the car, clean it and remove the floor mats, the pleas said.

The defense raised the theory of an alternative suspect. Sahl, who said he also struggled with alcohol and cocaine addiction, was seen on video “behaving in an angry and provocative manner toward Mr. Bal… sometimes almost to an absurd degree,” yet testified that he could not remember if he had been angry with him, Schultes wrote.

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His status as an alternative suspect is “viable enough to be considered” due to his level of aggression, criminal history and his reference to a golf club as one of the possible weapons, Schultes wrote.

The judge noted another concern raised by the defense: that police investigators demonstrated “tunnel vision” once the Birings became suspects and were unable to obtain video of Sahl’s residence, verify his whereabouts at the time. of the assault or obtain his DNA.

And there was also no follow-up on the identity of a person linked to drug trafficking whom Bal had threatened to hit while speaking with him on the phone before the attack, as well as the possible involvement of a person linked to a car similar to the one belonging to the Biring family.

Schultes said there was a theory that “a drug dealer or one of the other people Bal had disagreements with” could have killed him. The reasonable alternative is that someone other than the accused was present at the scene, he concluded.

“It follows that I must declare both defendants innocent,” he wrote.

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