Laura Kolstad and her teenage son are lucky to be alive after a hail of bullets shot up their Port Moody apartment in what appears to be a random drive-by shooting.
Kolstad was at home in her Angela Drive apartment with her son and a roommate at about 11 p.m. Sunday when she heard what sounded like fireworks coming from the street below.
"Then I heard a big crash and someone yelled, 'Phone the cops!'" Kolstad recalled in her living room Monday, still visibly shaken by the incident.
At least six bullets brought significant damage to Kolstad's second floor patio, ripping cleanly through steel banisters, shattering the glass of her double-paned patio doors and punching into the door frame, yet, miraculously, none of the bullets made it through the steel and double-paned safety glass into the living room or upstairs where the three residents were at the time.
Kolstad said they moved into the quiet Port Moody apartment beside Seaview elementary in January and she has no idea who would do this to them or why.
"For all I know it could be just punks who got a hold of a gun and decided to have a little fun. But according to the police officers, they were a pretty good shot and, if it did go through, somebody would have definitely been hurt," Kolstad said.
Port Moody police are equally baffled, asking the public to come forward with any information they may have.
Police recovered bullet casings from the scene Sunday night, Kolstad said, and spent hours talking to residents of the apartment building and surrounding homes. But few residents that The News talked to on Monday morning reported seeing or hearing anything unusual in the neighbourhood before the police showed up with lights and sirens.
One neighbour thought he heard some loud bangs around the time of the shooting but assumed it was thunder.
Another resident of the same building where the shooting happened said she has lived in the apartment for 35 years and it has always been a nice, quiet neighbourhood. She said her neighbours who were victimized by the shooting are always polite to her and don't seem to be the kind of people who would be involved in incidents like this.
"They're really very nice people," she said. "They just seem like a family to me."
Although the Seaview neighbourhood on the border with Coquitlam is typically quiet, Kolstad's apartment is little more than a kilometre from the scene of a drive-by shooting at the intersection of Clarke Road and Glenayre Drive that put two men in hospital with multiple gunshot wounds in December.
In April of last year, there was another drive-by shooting at a home in north Port Coquitlam, but nobody was injured and no suspects were arrested.
Anyone with information on this latest incident is asked to contact the Port Moody Police Department at 604-461-3456 or call Crime Stoppers anonymously at 1-800-222-TIPS (8477).
tcoyne@tricitynews.com
