Vancouver police are investigating after a shooting in Oppenheimer Park Thursday evening sent one man to hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.
Officers were called to the park just after 5:30 p.m. and found the victim suffering from a gunshot wound. He was taken to hospital.
The department deployed a "number of resources to the park to ensure the safety of the residents,” police said in a press release.
The investigation is ongoing and no further information is being released at this time.
Anyone who has any information, or witnesses the shooting, is asked to call VPD’s major crime section at 604-717-2541 or Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-8477.
There have been several shootings in the area in recent months.
Four shootings were reported in the Downtown Eastside in the span of a week near the end of September. The first two happened on Sept. 22 within two hours of one another — near East Hastings Street and Dunlevy Avenue and another in the area of East Pender and Abbott streets — followed by a Sept. 23 incident at the Grand Union Hotel.
A 35-year-old Surrey man was then shot Sept. 29 near East Hastings and Heatley Avenue.
The VPD also busted a murder plot by arresting three street gang members who were allegedly planning to kill a rival drug trafficker who operates near Oppenheimer earlier in October.
And in October, a 53-year-old Powell River woman was shot while it a vehicle on Dunlevy Avenue near the park.
Police later said it was determined that the woman was visiting a man who was staying in the encampment at the park, and investigators quickly identified the woman’s son as the shooter and believe he accidentally discharged the gun while speaking to her near the vehicle. The suspect, a man in his 30s, was arrested by police later that same week for another violent offense.
