deadmonton 2006 - thomas tipo orak

"I'm saying I'm not good because I lost my son," Nyachangjwok Ojual said. "My son is a good son, quiet, friendly, lovely boy."

The grieving mother recounted her journey to Canada.

"We came here because we have a war in my country. We don't come here to get somebody to die again.

"When I came here I get a bad life now because I lost my son. Everybody is not happy now because we miss him."

Daniel Ding, Orak's stepfather, was asked what would be an appropriate sentence for a person found guilty of the shooting.

"Appropriate sentence for somebody like that ... that's an animal, that's not a human."

The grieving man said he wanted the killer to stay behind bars indefinitely.

Orak's family also said Thomas was not part of a gang and it was his first visit to that bar – a claim contrary to one made by friends.

"My cousin Thomas he's a good boy. He hardly go out and it was really shock for everybody," Linda Akoj said.

"Even myself I can't believe it."

About 250 gathered for an hour-long Lutheran ceremony sprinkled with hymns and readings in Arabic.

"It seems unbelievable it isn't even a full week that Thomas was killed," said Pastor Larry MacKay, noting "it's a lifetime of emotions and questions."

"A week ago noon, Thomas still had his family and you had him ..."

With the triple-shooting grabbing headlines daily, MacKay saw fit to put events into perspective.

"Talk and speculation is cheap," he said. "The grief is life-altering."

McKay cautioned people not to pass judgement.

"It is so easy, too easy, to do such a thing when the person is not your son, not your brother, not your friend, but just a headline in the paper or a lead story on the evening news," he said.

"Some are thinking about just how easily it could have been them. A bunch of parents among us are thinking how easily it could have been our son or our daughter instead of Thomas."

Orak's stepfather, Daniel Ding, remembered him as a "loving, caring and helpful" person. He also took the opportunity to acknowledge the work of investigators.

"A special thank you to the Edmonton police for their efforts to bring the culprit to a safe situation where he cannot reach or harm any family again," he said.

Ding also detailed Orak's short but eventful life, about how he was born in a small town in Sudan.

The country soon became embroiled in civil war and Orak's mother, Nyachangjwok Ojual, fled with her children to Ethiopia.

About three years later, the Ethiopian government collapsed and rebels devastated Ethiopia's Sudanese refugee camps.

Ojual and her four children returned to Sudan, only to flee again two years later.

On their way back to Ethiopia, Orak – then about six years old– collapsed in exhaustion after walking days for long hours.

"They were being chased, and there was gunfire. She thought to leave him and go away with the other kids," Ding said.

"She took a couple of steps and looked back at her son, sitting down crying. She said to herself that she would not leave her son to die. She would rather die.

"With God's help she managed to take her kids to Ethiopia."

Staying again in a refugee camp, Orak started school. In 2001, the family came to Canada to start "a second life."

Orak attended St. Joseph's and had intended to enrol in courses at NAIT in January 2007, Ding said.

The sight of Orak's open casket sent some women into fits of wailing as they threw themselves on the floor. The emotional scene spilled out onto the street as his coffin was slid into a waiting hearse.

A tearful 34-year-old Michael Dak met Orak in an Ethiopian refugee camp in 1997 when Orak's mother took him in.

"Thomas was a good kid ... It's a great loss. He escaped under fire. And his mother was courageous to manage to get him into Ethiopia and a safer place at that time.

"I happened to live with him in the same house. His mother welcomed me when I left Sudan. I was 22," Dak said.

Still in shock, Dak maintained to keep strong the ties forged abroad.

"We as a family will do our best to stick together," he said. "We pray that God will give us the courage to cope with this tragedy."

Dak said Orak was planning to move in with him in Wainwright and look for work.

Another man who met Orak in the same refugee camp also spoke of tragic irony.

"That's terrible," Jima Abraham said. "When you struggle for your life and come to a safer place and things happen, it's terrible."

"For a tragedy like this to happen to him while he's just young, you know, it's unimaginable," childhood friend Reuban Aiakkur said.

Addressing the camera, Aiakkur also made a commitment.

"To Thomas, rest in peace. And you know in your heart I will be there for your family – they need me.

"And since you my close friend, you'll always be in my heart," Aiakkur said.

Pallbearer Reuben Riak Kur said Orak was like a brother to him. "I was just devastated," he said.

Kur said he and six others almost ended up at the Red Light Lounge themselves that night after deciding to leave another club.

"We called cabs and everything. There were no cabs. We called our friends and they didn't have rides."

The group abandoned the plan and later found out Orak had been fatally shot.

"All of us here, we could have all been there," Kur said.

Two unidentified girls also expressed their loss.

"He's a real player, like basketball and everything. We miss him," one said.

"We used to play together and stuff. We miss him a lot," said the other.

After the service, stepfather Daniel Ding again extended his gratitude to local citizens.

"They have really brought the confidence in as the whole community of Edmonton are really sharing with us all this tragedy. We are thankful for that," he said.

"My fear is is how the mother is going to cope with this situation. He was the expectation of the whole family when he turns 18," Ding said.

"All of them were looking for him as a father immediately.

"But unfortunately, things never went right and he was slain and his body is beside us today."

Three young men, one shared fate

by Joel Kom

Three men lay on the floor of the nightclub. Two were dead. The other was about to die.

Patrons screamed and scrambled to escape as friends ran to the three men. They cradled their heads, searching frantically for signs of life. The police tried to round up witnesses to the shooting while emergency crews cut away the clothes of the wounded survivor. He soon stopped breathing.

Thomas Orak, Jacey Pinnock and Dave Persaud had never met before they died at the Red Light Lounge in Edmonton's worst homicide in nearly three decades.

Other than the way their lives ended, they seem at first to have little in common. They were born in three different countries and were raised in vastly different circumstances: war for one, a nomadic suburban life for another, wealth followed by near-poverty for the third.

But in other ways, they followed strikingly similar paths: they or their families were newcomers to Canada, they had begun shouldering life-altering responsibilities within the last year, and they carried the ambitions of their families with them.

Four bullets. Three lives. The hopes and dreams of three families gone.

In a hut on the banks of the White Nile River in Sudan, surrounded by the elder women of her community, Nyachangjwok Ojual gave birth to her first son. It was New Year's Day in 1987. Sudan was being shredded by a civil war that would eventually leave close to two million people dead.

Ojual had to flee to a stranger's home to give birth. She named her son Tipo, meaning "in the shadow of another," in memory of the escape. She gave him the Christian name Thomas, and he bore the last name of his father, John Orak, who was recruited into the South Sudan Liberation Movement that was locked in a battle with the Sudanese government. He would rarely reappear in Thomas's life, as was the case for most men gobbled up by the war.

Thomas Tipo Orak "was born in the confusion of war, when everyone was trying to run away," said his uncle, Daniel Lwal.

Orak was six months old when he, his mother and his older sister made their first run to a refugee camp. They crossed rivers and forests, avoiding the main roads patrolled by government troops.

They arrived in 1988 at the camp that would be their home for the next three years. There was no running water, only river water. Medical service was scarce, as was food. People in the camp were lucky to get a tent in which to sleep.

Ojual became a director of a school started by the refugees. She fed the children rice, wheat, cabbage and other rations while she watched over them. Thomas, too young for school, played with other children.

The war's friction eventually spilled into the refugee camp, forcing a mass evacuation that sent a pregnant Ojual fleeing with her two children and 40 others in her care.

On this run back to the Sudanese border, surrounded by scrambling people and wildlife and sapped of energy after three days without food, Ojual faced a wrenching decision.

Her group had just been robbed and stripped naked by highway gangs. She lost sight of her daughter in the ensuing confusion. Weak to the point of collapse, she decided to unstrap Thomas from her back and leave him behind.

"When you go three days without food, you're like a drunken person," she said through translation by Lwal. "You don't have the power, you don't have the strength" to think straight.

That's when Thomas, then three, started sobbing and pleading with his mother: "Are you going to leave me here?" She had walked a few feet away but, hearing Thomas's cries, regained her bearings, turned back and picked him up. She strapped him to her back again and began plodding her way towards their next temporary haven.

The four-day walk to the camp on the Sudanese border took its toll on those who dared make the trek. Sudanese government forces used Russian planes to bombard fleeing refugees, killing five of the children under the watch of Thomas Orak's mother. But Thomas made it.

Life became simpler once he reached the temporary camp. He went to school in the mornings, fished in a nearby river in the afternoon and played soccer in the evenings. He was a quiet, shy child well-known because of his mother's position at the camp's school.

Three years later, they were on the move again, off to another refugee camp. Once again they navigated looters and tribal conflicts. Thomas cried sometimes during the 15-day walk. His mother offered constant reassurance: "We're almost there, we're almost there."

As the eldest son, his responsibilities grew. He would clean the family's shelter and cultivate the tomatoes, onions and pumpkins. He was seven when he began representing his family at community meetings, returning later to fill his mother in on what happened.

It was also here that Thomas's mother first thought of relocating her family. Some foreign embassies were handing out resettlement forms, and she yearned for the chance to escape the instability that had plagued her family. She focused on one country: Canada.

Thomas Orak arrived in Toronto in 2001, the same year Dave Persaud had landed there with his family. But Orak and his mother, two sisters and two brothers didn't stay long. They moved to Edmonton two months later to reunite with some family.

While his mother launched herself into improving her English and academic credentials, Orak ended up at St. Joseph's Catholic high school. He struggled to learn a new language but quickly made friends, especially with other Sudan-born students.

He cooked for and looked after his siblings while his mother went to school and did night cleaning shifts at the Shaw Conference Centre.

"He was like the husband, the brother, the son," said his uncle, Daniel Lwal.

In between, he would play soccer and basketball with friends. His mother taught him to drive in 2005, which he put to use by buying an early 1990s green Ford Probe to drive her around when she was tired from work.

He understood the duty on his shoulders. The eldest male is vital in his culture, but with his father 4,500 kilometres away in Sudan, Orak carried a heavier burden. Although he was 18, he rarely went out on weekends.

He took a job assembling windows and planned to go to NAIT to become a mechanic. He told his mother he wanted to earn enough for her to stop working overnight shifts at a seniors' residence.

Oct. 28, 2006, was a Saturday.

At his townhouse in Kilkenny near 144th Avenue and 72nd Street, Orak said goodbye to his mother. The 19-year-old told her he was going to get the criminal background check he needed to start his laundry job at the Royal Alexandra Hospital. He made no mention of going to a nightclub.

Orak arrived at the Red Light Lounge at about 1 a.m. – at about the same time as Jacey Pinnock. Each came with their own group of friends. Dave Persaud was already in the club, having arrived a half-hour earlier.

One of the men in Pinnock's group was Dwayne Nelson, a 22-year-old friend who had been to barbecues at Jacey's house and was with him at West Edmonton Mall when Jacey bought the green-striped shirt he was wearing that night.

The dance floor came alive and the night grew longer when, at 2 a.m., the clocks were set back an hour to standard time. About 150 people filled the club.

Just after the second 2 a.m., Persaud's best friend, Ajith Durairaj, began dancing off against another man. As the friendly competition got underway, a fight broke out on the dance floor among 10 or so men.

Persaud went over to try to break it up, only to start getting punched himself. Durairaj turned to see his friend hunched over trying to protect himself. He rushed across the dance floor, grabbed a beer bottle and broke it over someone's head.

The bouncers broke things up and ejected some of the men who had been involved in the fight. Pinnock told his friends he was going home. Thomas and his friends decided to do the same. Persaud was cut and decided he should go to a hospital.

They all moved toward the front door, but their exit was slowed by the mass of people trying to do the same. That's when at least two men walked in from outside.

"Someone's gonna die," Durairaj heard one say. Durairaj tried to get himself and Persaud around the two men. One of them looked at him: "Where do you think you're going?" he said.

"While I'm talking (to the man)" Durairaj recalled, "out of the corner of my eye I see his hand moving."

He didn't have time to see more – Persaud pushed him out of the way.

"All I hear is gunshots," he said. "In a split second, everybody starts screaming."

The two people on either side of Durairaj collapsed. One of them was Persaud.

Panic rushed through Bolis Wol, one of Orak's best friends.

"All I see is (a man) start popping the gun five, six times," he said a day after the shooting. "I look and my friend was down. I just went to him. I was shocked. I went to see if he was breathing. It was too late."

Orak was hit once in the head. Pinnock was hit once in his chest, near his armpit, a location his mother and his friends thought was an indication he was trying to grab the gun away from the shooter.

Durairaj splashed water in Orak's and Pinnock's faces to try to revive them, but he could tell they were already dead.

He did the same to Persaud, who was breathing slowly, not talking, just looking at the two friends who were with him. No one could tell what was wrong: they couldn't see any blood.

They noticed a toonie-size bloodstain near his left shoulder but couldn't see the wound's details in the dark club. They didn't realize he had been shot twice.

It was just after 2:30 a.m. Emergency crews stormed in. They checked on Orak and Pinnock but quickly moved to Persaud and started cutting his clothes off. They loaded him into an ambulance. He died on the way to the hospital.

The phone rang in Orak's home a few minutes later. It was Wol, Orak's best friend. His mother answered.

"They say, 'Somebody shoot your son and he died,' " she said, recounting that night.

The big white Converse shoes with green streaks near the heels sit among the large pile next to Ojual's front door. She's been keeping her son's shoes there since he died.

"When I come back and see the shoes, I think my son inside," she said.

Her grief has been compounded by the hard time she's having adjusting to the Canadian justice system, its cogs turning slower than things would in her small community in Sudan. She wrestles with her decision to come to Canada, a decision meant to shield her children from harm.

"They say in this country there is human rights and no guns, and yet someone shoot him in a place and kill him," she said. "How come?"

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