Students, staff and parents at New Westminster’s Lord Tweedsmuir Elementary are being offered grief counselling after a grandmother of students at the school was killed in what police are calling a random, unprovoked attack.
Police responded around 6:45 p.m. Wednesday to reports of a man and woman fighting in the 1500 block of Eighth Avenue.
When officers arrived, the woman was dead.
Neighbours told the Record police pursued a man up 16th Street before taking him down near Dublin Street.
School District No. 40 superintendent John Gaiptman said community members, including some Lord Tweedsmuir students, saw parts of the attack and the man.
Students, parents and staff at the school are traumatized by the event, Gaiptman said.
“Whether they were traumatized because they saw part of it or whether they were traumatized because this is their neighbourhood and nobody wants to ever believe that this could happen in their neighbourhood, when something like that happens it traumatizes us,” he said. “And we want to make sure that there is support. That’s what a good neighbourhood school does.”
Gaiptman said the school district and school knows the identity of the woman but not the man.
Despite earlier rumours of it being a domestic dispute, police said at a press conference Thursday that the homicide was a random attack.
“This is just such a horrible thing for the community, and we just want to make sure that anybody that’s suffering any sort of anxiety because of what happened has somebody that they can talk to,” Gaiptman said.
The district’s crisis response team and NWPD liaison officer were on hand at Lord Tweedsmuir today, Gaiptman said, and the district has also called in help from New Westminster Mental Health.
The school sent home a notice with students Thursday, urging parents to watch for signs of stress in their kids.
Parents were also provided a pamphlet about children who experience trauma. The factsheet directed parents to a website (actagainstviolence.org) for more information.
