Nelson Guerrero's three-year-old son is the only close-up witness to the death of his father, who was shot dead in a targeted attack Monday.
The unidentified child was sitting in the back seat of his father's sedan at about 8 p.m. when someone opened fire on the elder Guerrero and kept shooting as the 33-year-old man got out of his car. He died within three metres of his child on a New Westminster street. The child was unharmed.
"There is no doubt in our minds that the motivation of the individual was to target Mr. [Guerrero] Our job is to find out why," RCMP Corporal Dale Carr, spokesman for the Integrated Homicide Investigation Team, said in an interview.
Cpl. Carr said Mr. Guerrero was not known to police - a shorthand that suggests there is no obvious link to gangs or the underworld.
"We know who the victim is. He's Nelson Ramirez Guerrero. We know that. That's his name, but we don't know who he is - in quotes," Cpl. Carr said. "We don't know if he belongs to some group and he's just been somebody that was able to fly under the radar, or whether he's some person involved in business and a business deal went bad and he ultimately ended up murdered because of it, or is this some domestic situation."
Police are looking for other witnesses, but "by virtue of the fact that [the child]was in the back seat of the very car that his father was being shot in, he was the closest to the scene," Cpl. Carr said.
Investigators have interviewed the dead man's child, now in the care of his mother. Mr. Guerrero was divorced. At the time of his death, he is thought to have been dropping off his son with the child's mother as part of a custody arrangement.
"Investigators, at one point in the evening, managed to have a conversation with the young boy," said Cpl. Carr, when asked whether police got anything out of the child. "… We have to take into consideration that he's 3."
Court records show a Nelson Guerrero was sentenced to 54 months in jail in Louisiana in 2001 for wire and telemarketing fraud and ordered to pay $37,000 in restitution.
Asked about that situation, Cpl. Carr said, "We are aware of the U.S. issues and are in the process of confirming if he is the same person that was murdered."
"We're looking at any and all options and we're trying to see where are the facts and the evidence that we're learning, basically hour by hour, leading us, and what sort of line are we doing down," Cpl. Carr said.
He declined to comment on whether Mr. Guerrero's former spouse was co-operating with police.
The case, he said, is "certainly perplexing. We have a great deal of work ahead of us here to understand what, if any, connections [Mr. Guerrero]has to anything here in the Lower Mainland. We're trying to work through that."
The prospect of eliciting such information prompted police to quickly release the victim's name. "Maybe people will come forward and give us some information as to who Nelson Ramirez Guerrero is."