(Vancouver) A man convicted for his part in the 2001 baseball bat slaying of a gay Vancouver man has had his bid for parole turned down. Ryan Cran was sentenced in 2005 to six years behind bars for his part in the gang attack on Aaron Webster, 41. The appeals board said that Cran could reapply for parole in another two years.

... at the sentencing hearing the judge was told that Cran had not shown any remorse for the killing. The prosecutor said that the pack of armed men were looking to hunt down another human being for entertainment. Cran's parole board hearing was told he still has not shown remorse.

The similarities struck me immediately. Two teenage boys accused of viciously attacking a man in a park, pummeling him with a baseball bat, leaving him to die. The man minding his own business, defenceless, brutally beaten "for entertainment." Aaron Webster?

No. Shingara Singh Thandi.

"They hit Mr Thandi at least three times on the head with the force of a hammer hitting a nail," his eldest son, Jhalman, told The Voice Online. In fact, Thandi's killers hit him so hard they rendered his face unrecognizable, his skull fractured, his dentures shattered. He was 76 years old. He was attacked in Surrey's Bear Creek Park on Jul 19, 2005. He never regained consciousness.

Thandi was the boys' second target. Their first, another elderly Indo-Canadian man named Mewa Singh Bains, was attacked in the same park, in the same bathroom, in the same way the previous day. He suffered a stroke a few weeks later and died as well.

[...]

Though Crown lawyers initially charged the boys with robbery and assault, they later upgraded one charge to murder after the Indo-Canadian community expressed its outrage.

But the judge refused to convict the boys of murder. "Here it cannot be forgotten that the accused were 13 and 15 years of age at the time of the offence," Justice William Grist ruled as he convicted the boys of manslaughter instead. "The lack of life experience and the relative inability to see serious consequences accompanying an act are hallmarks of youth."

The Indo-Canadian community was understandably appalled. A month later BC Attorney General Wally Oppal intervened.

"We think that the judge made a mistake in convicting these two young men of manslaughter. We think they should have been convicted of murder," Oppal told CBC Radio, Apr 27. "In this case," he continued, "we think that those two individuals were waiting for the elderly men with bats and obviously knew the consequences of their actions."

Funny, the Attorney General didn't feel so strongly when Aaron Webster's killers were charged with and later convicted of manslaughter -- not murder.

Remember Ed Smith, the pop bottle collector who swears Ryan Cran and his buddies attacked him, too? Smith says a group of guys confronted him at Second Beach, pushed him down, beat him with a baseball bat and called him a "faggot" just days before Webster was killed.

Smith never did take the stand against Cran. The Crown said it was because he couldn't positively identify his attackers. But the licence plate Smith gave police was just one number off the vehicle eventually identified as Cran's from the night of Webster's beating.

Oppal says he contacted the Crown and launched an appeal in this case after the Indo-Canadian community came to him for help. When the gay community asked then-Attorney General Geoff Plant to investigate the Crown's handling of the Webster case--its refusal to press murder charges or characterize it as a hate crime--we came up empty.

[...]

I guess Vancouver's Indo-Canadian community presents a more powerful voting bloc than ours, and Aaron a less sympathetic figure than a sweet old man on a stroll.

Contrast the reaction by cops, courts and community to the beating death of young, photogenic student Jomar Lanott in Vancouver, as opposed to the beating death of middle-aged Vancouver gay man Aaron Webster. In the former, it was largely because of racism, and large community meetings were held, cops were extremely active on the file, and murder charges were laid. In the latter, it was a gay bashing, no community meetings were held, cops seemed to be largely indifferent to the case, and crown prosecutors filed only manslaughter charges.