Surrey man shares disturbing story of homeless man being attacked in broad daylight

SURREY (NEWS1130) – As Surrey continues to grapple with a series of shootings earlier this spring, we’re now finding out about a different — but no less disturbing — attack.

A man in Whalley says he and his wife witnessed one of their community’s most vulnerable members being beaten by a group of young men.

Oliver Allen and his wife were out for a walk around 6 o’clock Monday evening on 103rd Avenue near 144th Street.

Allen saw a van pull up and three men — all in their late teens or early twenties — rush over to a homeless man pushing a shopping cart; he says they started punching and kicking the man.

He says a girl in the van yelled “he’s had enough” and the young men saw Allen walking toward them; they jumped back into the van and drove off.

“The homeless guy was just sitting on the ground crying, and I went up to him and I said, ‘Are you okay, buddy?’ And, he said, ‘Does it look like I’m okay?’ And, I said to him, ‘What was that all about?’ and he said, ‘I have no idea.’ He said, ‘I was just minding my own business walking down the street.'”

“The homeless guy looked like he was in about his early forties, maybe late thirties — he wasn’t too old, but he looked like he had been through a world-and-a-half, if you know what I mean,” says Allen.

“He was pushing a yellow cart with different things on it and he was sitting on the ground and his mouth was bleeding. And I said, ‘Do you know those guys?’ and he said, ‘No, no, I have no idea who those guys are.’ And I said, ‘Why did they pick you?’ and he said, ‘Stop asking me so many questions. I have no idea what’s going on.'”

Allen — who is a nurse — says the man didn’t want police or an ambulance to be called, apparently not trusting he’d really get the help he needed.

“His answer was pretty much, ‘No, I’ve already dealt with the ambulance people too many times and the police aren’t going to do anything for me.’ It sounded like he was somebody that had already been through the system quite a few times and been kicked around from place to place… so he had little faith in the system.”

Allen doesn’t believe the man was trying to hide anything, adding he works with homeless people all the time who are picked up by an ambulance, and may be resistant to getting help.

He gave the man his pack of cigarettes and lighter, and asked the man if there was anything else he could do. The man said no.

“I’m still thinking about it. I mean, this is too close to home, right? We have homeless folks on our street and in our neighbourhood and there are a lot of hardworking families — a lot of good people in this neighbourhood. It just breaks my heart to see something like this happen to somebody that’s already been through a lot in their life.”

“I mean if somebody’s homeless, you should have the utmost sympathy for them — especially coming from three 20-year-olds. I just think this is the youth of today, preying on the weak and innocent. I don’t know what their motive was. I don’t know if this was just for fun and giggles. I don’t know why they did this.”

Mounties say while they want to respect the wishes of victims, sometimes public safety outweighs that.

“I’m not sure if that applies in this situation because the police have never been contacted by either the victim or the witness,” says Corporal Scotty Schumann with Surrey RCMP.

“But generally, we always encourage people to report crimes that they observe for any number of reasons. Primarily, calling the police can assist us in capturing people that are committing crimes. Even if it’s something that’s insignificant that may not require police attendance, at least we can add that information to our database and we can see crimes or problems trending in areas. That helps us to focus our patrols,” he explains.

Schumann says street-level robberies are happening across the city, but police haven’t received reports of specifically homeless people being targeted.

It isn’t known whether robbery was the motive behind this attack.