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Port Coquitlam man given 14 years, no parole for shotgun murder

The sentencing comes nearly four and a half years after Randy William Scott shot Peter Bender to death in the parking lot of a Maple Ridge church
A father of two young children, Peter Bender was 33-years-old when he was killed in December 2015
A father of two young children, Peter Bender was 33-years-old when he was killed in December 2015

A Port Coquitlam man has been handed a 14-year prison sentence for the 2015 shooting death of a co-worker in a Maple Ridge church parking lot. 

Randy William Scott, 33, was found guilty of the second-degree murder of Peter Bender in January and while Scott was sentenced May 9, the court ruling was released this last week. 

According to the court documents, in the months leading up to the murder, Scott and Bender worked at the same Brick Furniture Store in Pitt Meadows. When Bender started dating the same co-worker Scott had spent months pursuing in an attempt at a failed intimate relationship, Scott became increasingly angry and jealous, wrote Justice Kathleen Ker. 

“[Scott] refused or was unable to accept that she had moved on and only wanted a platonic relationship,” the judge wrote in her decision. 

On Dec. 18, 2015 — the day before the murder — Scott said he had become so distraught that he thought of killing himself. It was his brother’s birthday, so he took a day off work, going to a movie and lunch to celebrate.

That night, Scott went to the Hard Rock Casino in Coquitlam, where he lost $3,000, according to court documents. It was the first time he had gambled in three and a half years and the judge accepted the episode must have seriously affected him.

“No doubt this filled him with self-loathing, disappointment and anger,” the judge wrote.

Scott then picked up the female co-worker with whom he had been infatuated and gave her a ride to a Christmas party. When she rejected his advances, the two got into a heated argument. Scott went home, where he continued to send “derogatory and vile text messages” to both the woman and Bender. 

A three-way spat of text messages continued throughout the early morning of Dec. 19, and when the female co-worker stopped answering Bender’s texts, Justice Ker wrote, Bender drove to her home. He tried to get her attention through a window but when he didn’t get an answer, he went to his car, which was parked at a church across the street.

At the same time, Scott said he had decided to put off suicide until the next day but tossed and turned when he tried to sleep off his anger, according to court documents. He went into his basement and grabbed a shotgun and rifle.

Scott said his original plan was to “blow his brains out” in front of the female co-worker to show her how much pain she had caused him but when he saw Bender’s car idling in the church parking lot, he boxed him in, pulled out his loaded shotgun and walked up to the driver-side window. 

A witness who was loading his car for a snowmobile trip testified he heard four shots in quick succession as he crouched at a nearby fence line. 

Scott shot Bender though the open window, killing him instantly, according to an RCMP forensic investigation. 

When police from the Ridge Meadows RCMP detachment arrived five minutes later, they found Bender wounded, a cell phone still glowing on the passenger seat with a final composed but unsent message. 

“Like I’m trippin over you and for who knows,” it read, after which the text was a series of letters, commas, the word BBQ repeated five times and 23 lines of the letter q, the letter v and some commas.

It was as if the keyboard had become stuck, wrote Justice Ker, adding that in all likelihood, Bender was composing the message when Scott shot him.

In her sentencing decision, Justice Ker noted Scott was an upstanding member of society before he murdered Bender. She considered Scott’s emotional distress, history of addiction and obsessive behaviour towards women.

Against that, the judge weighed several victim impact statements, noting how Bender’s murder shattered the lives of the people around him. 

His mother still expects to see her only son to walk in when she hears the back door open, and describes her heart has been “shredded apart.”

Bender, who was 33 years old at the time of his murder, also left behind two children he had been co-parenting with his ex-wife. Since his death, his ex-wife indicated that the children are struggling with prolonged grief and unexplained bouts of anger. 

At Christmas, said the mother, the children asked Santa to bring their father back on their wish-lists.