The man who masterminded a series of arsons and shootings around the Lower Mainland - including at the former home of a West Vancouver Police Department chief - has been given a lengthy prison sentence.
Vincent Cheung has been handed a sentence of 13 years and six months after pleading guilty to 14 charges of arson and four of discharging a firearm. Cheung engaged in a 10-month “bizarre, malevolent enterprise,” targeting people connected to the Justice Institute of B.C. in New Westminster, including former West Vancouver Police chief Scott Armstrong.
On Jan. 13, 2012, someone firebombed Armstrong’s previous residence in West Vancouver. Armstrong was working for the JIBC police, firefighter and paramedic training school in 2011.
The West Vancouver tenant found herself awoken by the sound of someone outside her door, followed by the “whoosh” of a fire roaring to life and the smashing of glass. The victim called 911 and rushed outside with her two dogs. She went back into her bedroom to get the car keys, suffering smoke inhalation in the process and requiring treatment in hospital.
Surveillance video captured from the West Vancouver home showed it was not Cheung who set the fire, but rather a then-unknown arsonist Cheung hired.
At the time of his arrest in 2015, police said the suspect had ties to the United Nations gang.
In 2011, Cheung logged licence plate numbers from vehicles parked in JIBC’s parking lot and later persuaded an ICBC employee to illegally look up the names and addresses of the vehicles’ owners. That employee was fired and remains under police investigation, according to Crown counsel Joe Bellows.
Cheung was a heavy drug user and suffering from paranoid delusions at the time, when he either personally carried out the arsons or shootings or hired other people to do the work for him. At times he believed the JIBC was targeting him from a satellite with the intention to “clip” him, and that members of the JIBC were speaking to him through his car speakers.
Cheung’s lawyer had argued 10 years would be a more appropriate sentence, given that Cheung pleaded guilty, shown remorse and stopped taking the drugs that led to his paranoid delusions.
But, at the time of the arrest, he was found to have multiple weapons and ammo in his home, Justice Austin Cullen noted, arguing the risk to human life and lasting trauma he caused merited a lengthier sentence.
"His motives were rooted in delusions. His responses to those delusions are very real and very dangerous,” Justice Austin Cullen said.
The Crown had been seeking a sentence of 15 years. Because of time already served behind bars, Cheung has another 12 years left on his sentence.
