Man who was stabbed, shot called police on cellphone

Victim later died in hospital; homicide detectives investigating

EDMONTON - A wounded man who was stabbed and shot several times made his own 911 call to police Tuesday, and stayed on the line for 30 minutes while officers frantically tracked the signal from his cellphone.

The 21-year-old, who was found at an abandoned farm in southwest Edmonton, later died in hospital.

Homicide detectives are investigating, and police are treating the death as suspicious.

If the case is declared a homicide, it would be the city’s 44th of the year.

Police received a call shortly after noon from the wounded man, who told them he had been stabbed, said Insp. Brian Nowlan.

The man was “distressed” and didn’t know where he was, Nowlan said.

“We could tell that he was obviously in distress. He just kept saying he was hurt, he needed help.”

It took police nearly 30 minutes to locate the man by tracking the signal from his cellphone to a large, abandoned farm on 170th Street, just south of Ellerslie Road.

When police arrived, they found the man — still clutching his cellphone — lying on the ground about 15 metres from a white sedan. The car was parked between several outbuildings on the tree-lined farm.

“He was lying on the road suffering from what appears to be several gunshot wounds and at least one stab wound,” Nowlan said at the scene.

STARS air ambulance was dispatched to the scene but did not transport the victim, said spokesman Cameron Heke.

“Our medical crew ... assisted with the care of the patient in the back of a ground ambulance with Alberta Health Services,” Heke said.

“The patient was in critical condition with life-threatening injuries.”

The victim was taken to Royal Alexandra Hospital, where he died of his injuries, police said.

Police believe the man drove the sedan north on 170th Street before he came to a stop at the farm.

“There’s some tracks going through a field that are actually leaving the street, but whether those are actually his or not, we’ve yet to determine,” Nowlan said. “We’re going to have to trace back the vehicle and figure out exactly how it got there.”

It’s not clear yet whether the man was wounded at the farm or

elsewhere.

“There was no one else at the scene. We have no witnesses,” Nowlan said.

A police officer accompanied the victim to hospital, but it wasn’t clear if investigators were able to speak to the victim before he died.

Police spent about 90 minutes combing through the half-dozen outbuildings on the farm, looking for weapons and possible suspects, but didn’t find anything.

“We didn’t know, upon our response, whether or not that was the scene where this all took place. We had to be very meticulous.”

Police haven’t been able to track down an owner of the farm, Nowlan said.

The victim’s name has not yet been released. Nowlan would not confirm whether the man was known to police before this incident.

Police closed off 170th Street at Ellerslie Road, just south of the Windermere South subdivision, for several hours Tuesday as they investigated the death.

Edmonton has recorded 43 homicides in 2011, more than in any previous year.

There were 24 killings in Edmonton by the same time last year.