Brazen killing in Surrey parking lot was paid hit, B.C. judge says

The Integrated Homicide Investigation Team was called to a Surrey gas station after a fatal shooting on Sept. 28, 2019. (CTV)

A brazen killing where a masked man fired 16 shots into an SUV at a busy gas station was a paid hit, a B.C. judge said while sentencing the man convicted of the murder-for-hire.

Carlos Nathaniel Monteith was convicted of the first-degree murder of Kristijan Coric after a jury trial earlier this year and sentenced in B.C. Supreme Court last month to life in prison with no chance of parole for 25 years.

Justice Frits E. Verhoeven’s sentencing decision was posted online Friday, outlining the evidence that led him to determine with “near certainty” Monteith was paid tens of thousands of dollars by “persons unknown” to carry out the murder.

Coric was shot to death just after 6 p.m. on Sept. 28, 2019, at a Mobil gas station in Surrey, the court heard.

“This was a cold-blooded, calculated murder of an individual, in a busy public place, a gas station, when there were many people nearby or in the immediate vicinity,” the judge wrote.

The judge accepted the jury’s verdict that the “essential facts” of the offence of first-degree murder had been proven beyond a reasonable doubt, namely that Monteith was the person who shot and killed Coric, that he had the intent to do so, and that the murder was pre-meditated.

“The only question in issue on this sentencing hearing is whether it has been established on the evidence that the killing was in fact a killing for money,” Verhoeven wrote.

Prior to the murder, Monteith was “short on money,” according to the decision, which said bank records showed he received “tens of thousands of dollars” at the time of the killing. While in jail, Monteith also said he had been paid a “substantial amount of money” for doing “10 seconds of work.”

The day after the murder, Monteith and a man the decision describes as his accomplice went on a “shopping spree” at Holt Renfrew, purchasing “expensive items including expensive shoes” which he later “flaunted on social media, and flaunted and bragged about to other persons,” the court heard.

In addition to posting on social media and sending messages saying he “committed a hit for money,” Monteith “bragged about being a killer in the jail cells,” according to the decision.

All of this led the judge to conclude “the killing was conducted pursuant to a specific plan, and that plan was a paid killing, a hit, or in other words an assassination of Mr. Coric, carried out on behalf of unidentified others, in exchange for money.”

The court a victim impact statement from Coric’s brother, who said the victim was on his way to a birthday party for his niece when he was gunned down and that he leaves behind a son who will “grow up without the love and support of his father.”

Verhoeven’s decision also described the wide-spread impact of crimes like these.

“Although the Lower Mainland has been plagued by many such murders in the last several years, nevertheless this is a crime that shocks the community, and causes all members of the public to fear for their own safety, as well as the safety of others, at all times, and at all places,” the judge wrote.

Monteith – who has “been in prison for much of his life” exercised his right to address the court at sentencing, the decision noted.

“He states that his trial was unfair, and he maintains that he is innocent of the offence.”