Premier Eby ‘deeply disturbed’ as high-risk sex offender vanishes in Vancouver

CITYnews halifax / By Mike Lloyd, Charlie Carey

B.C. Premier David Eby says he is “deeply disturbed” an untreated, high-risk sex offender was able to walk away from his halfway house in Vancouver and effectively disappear over the weekend.

Randal Hopley, 58, is now wanted Canada-wide after vanishing Saturday, and the premier is criticizing the National Parole Board for not placing him under stricter supervision.

“That he was insufficiently supervised and able to walk away from a halfway house, I don’t understand why there weren’t sufficient safeguards put in place by the parole board on this individual to prevent this from happening,” Eby told media at an unrelated event Sunday.

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He explained that bail reform legislation, currently stuck in the Senate, needs to be prioritized to target repeat offenders and protect the public.

“It’s hard to underline the importance of ensuring the safety of our kids. We really look to the Senate to approve the bail reform bill as quickly as possible. It is unacceptable that they are sitting on this bill,” he said.

Hopley had been living at a halfway house after moving to Vancouver in 2018. He had just been released from prison where he served six years for abducting a three-year-old boy in Sparwood, B.C., in 2011.

At the time, Vancouver Police warned that he had been assessed as “a high risk for violent and sexual re-offending” and posed a “risk of significant harm to the safety of young boys.”

The National Parole Board placed Hopley under a 10-year supervision order.

Police understand the public’s fear, anxiety

Speaking to CityNews Monday morning, VPD Sgt. Steve Addison explained officers have been working hard the past two days following up on multiple tips and investigating Hopley’s disappearance.

“We understand there’s a lot of fear. There’s a lot of anxiety in the community over the fact that Hopley, who is violent and has a violent history of offenses including sexual offenses against children, has disappeared from his halfway house,” Addison said.

“We share those concerns in the community. They’re absolutely valid, and we’re doing everything that we can to track him down,”

Addison says police immediately started working to find Hopley when Correctional Services Canada notified them that he had failed to return to the halfway house at his curfew time of 7 p.m.

“As you can imagine, in a case like this with somebody who’s so recognizable, in a case [that] has generated so much attention, it does generate a lot of tips from the public. So, we’ve looked at tips as far away from Sunshine Coast to Richmond, Langley, Abbotsford, Surrey, and Vancouver. Ultimately, none of those tips have panned out at this point,” he explained.

Hopley had been staying at a halfway house near Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside neighbourhood, Addison says, and on Saturday afternoon he told people he was “headed towards a thrift store.”

“One of his hobbies is sewing, and we know he frequents a lot of thrift stores. So, he had told people that he was heading towards [a] thrift store in Vancouver. We believe that somewhere along the way he cut off his monitoring bracelet and then it disappeared,” Addison said.

While there haven’t yet been confirmed sightings of Hopley, Addison is urging the public to continue to notify police of any information.

“If you see somebody you think is him, you get that gut feeling, just call us, let us investigate, because we want to get him back into custody as quickly as we can so that we can begin to ease some of the fear and anxiety that has resulted in the fact that he’s taken off and skipped out on his halfway house.”

Hopley was scheduled to appear in provincial court in Vancouver Monday, charged with two counts of violating his supervision order in January after he was caught in a public library, just a metre away from some children.