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Suspect knew cop as a child

A 70-year-old man and the provincial police officer he is suspected of fatally shooting are both from a small northern Ontario village hundreds of kilometres from the scene of the shootout, but the suspect wouldn’t have made that connection, a neighbour said Wednesday.
Officer Shot 20100308
Ontario Provincial Constable Vu Pham.

A 70-year-old man and the provincial police officer he is suspected of fatally shooting are both from a small northern Ontario village hundreds of kilometres from the scene of the shootout, but the suspect wouldn’t have made that connection, a neighbour said Wednesday.

Const. Vu Pham, a 15-year veteran of the Ontario provincial police force and a married father of three boys, died several hours after pulling over a pickup truck in the rural southwestern Ontario village of Winthrop on Monday morning.

Police have said Pham, 37, was critically shot and immediately incapacitated.

Witnesses described a tense gunfight with 15 to 20 shots fired across a two-lane road in Winthrop, some 375 kilometres south of Sundridge near North Bay, where both the officer and the suspect lived at one time.

The suspect, Fred Preston, remained in critical condition Wednesday after being shot in the gunfight with two provincial police officers.

Pham, originally from Vietnam, was adopted as a boy by Dan Thompson, who became the pastor at Bethel Pentecostal Church in Sundridge, said a town resident who didn’t want to be named.

It was a stunning coincidence for the town of 1,000, she said.

“That’s why it shocked everybody in Sundridge,” said the woman, who like many other residents knows both Pham’s family — the Thompsons — and the Prestons.

Preston and Pham went to the same church when Pham was a boy, but Preston wouldn’t have connected the boy he knew to the 37-year-old police constable he is accused of shooting and killing, said one of Preston’s neighbours.

“Fred Preston would not realize at the time when this cop pulled him over that it was somebody that he knew from Sundridge,” said Alvin Chapman, who has known Preston for 45 years.