Van Chung Pham was ordered deported from Canada six years before police found the bodies of Noelle O’Soup and another unidentified woman in his Downtown Eastside home in May. The CBC has learned that Noelle and the other victim were not the first women to die in Pham’s presence. Immigration authorities have declared him a danger to the public because another woman died of an overdose at his former residence in Vancouver and because he sold fentanyl to vulnerable drug users. However, Pham was released from immigration detention with virtually no supervision in October 2020, as there appeared to be no hope of his removal from Canada in the face of a pandemic and Vietnamese officials. “I am satisfied that you are a long-term drug addict and that you use meth and fentanyl. I am also satisfied that you sell drugs to people and that you drug vulnerable women to have sex with you. A woman died of an overdose in your room,” Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) tribunal member Michael McFallen told Pham after granting his release. “So I find that you are a danger to the public. The only reason I’m letting you go is that I don’t think there’s any chance [the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA)] will be able to get a travel document for you and bring you back to Vietnam.”
Neglect of investigative duty
The CBC has obtained transcripts and audio recordings of both court and immigration hearings involving Pham in the years before he died. The details raise as many questions as they answer. Vancouver police found Pham’s body in his apartment in February, but initially missed the remains of Noel and the other woman. They returned to Flat 16 of Heatley Block more than two months later after neighbors complained of a foul smell. Noelle O’Soup left a group home in Port Coquitlam in 2021 when she was 13 years old. A year later, her body and that of another woman were found in Van Chung Pham’s apartment in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. The CBC has learned another woman died at Pham’s previous residence. (Submitted by Cody Munch) This oversight led to a dereliction of duty investigation against an officer involved in the case by the Office of the Police Complaints Commissioner. The Vancouver Police Department (VPD) said Pham’s death is not suspicious — but the other two deaths are now part of a major crime investigation. Police have not said anything about Pham or his background, but the CBC confirmed the 46-year-old was charged days before he died with sexual assault and drugging in a case involving a different woman. This incident reportedly happened in November 2020. The file was closed after his death. Noelle, a member of the Key First Nation in Saskatchewan, escaped from a provincial group in Port Coquitlam, BC, in May 2021 when she was 13 years old. The RCMP, which has jurisdiction in that area, said they were actively searching for her. The teenager’s family is demanding answers about how the government and justice systems failed to protect a vulnerable Indigenous girl from falling into the clutches of a man like Pham, whose criminal record spans nearly three decades.
A deportation order was first issued in 2012
At a 2015 sentencing hearing on drug-trafficking charges, Pham’s attorney told a judge that Pham had a “very difficult background.” According to court documents, Pham became a permanent resident in January 1993 after spending four years in refugee camps with his sister and aunt in Hong Kong and the Philippines. Pham and his sister came to Canada, but his aunt and uncle were deported to Sweden. His first criminal conviction was in 1994. This image was included in an advertisement for one of the rooms for rent in the Heatley Block on the Downtown Eastside, the building where the bodies of Noelle O’Soup, Van Chung Pham and another woman were found. Pham lived in a room in the building. (craigslist) Pham was sentenced to 30 months in prison for drug trafficking in 1997. He was first issued a deportation order in 2012 after a breaking and entering conviction, but that order was suspended on appeal the following year. Pham soon found himself back in court. In 2015, he testified that he started using heroin “since I moved here” and was also addicted to cocaine. He claimed to have gone straight for a while, but began self-healing after a fall from a five-story roof left him with brain damage and chronic pain. The trial heard that Pham had almost non-existent English language skills, having never taken a language course. His lawyer said Pham had not worked for the last 10 years of his life and sold drugs to support his addiction. “He’s a very marginalized person,” the defense attorney told the judge in 2015. At that hearing, Crown Counsel David Peltier responded that society “needs to be protected” from people like Pham, who were fueling a deadly drug crisis in the Downtown Eastside. He noted that Pham showed “little” remorse. “This is important,” Peltier told the judge. “His lack of insight that his efforts and activities are exacerbating a problem – a problem he should be all too aware of.” At the end of the 2015 trial, the judge sentenced Pham to 30 days and a year in jail. The decision was enough to reinstate the deportation order against him in 2016.
“Women used to come to your room to use drugs”
In the years that followed, Pham was in and out of immigration detention, released again and again under conditions that always broke. According to the transcript of an immigration hearing from July 2020, Vancouver police found him in possession of hard drugs five times between his first release in November 2017 and his 2018 drug possession arrest one day imprisonment. A woman died of an overdose in Van Chung Pham’s previous room at the Canada Hotel in downtown Vancouver. According to Immigration and Refugee Board court records, Pham is believed to have been giving drugs to vulnerable women in exchange for sex. (Ben Nelms/CBC) At some point during this time, a woman died of an overdose in Pham’s old room at the Canada Hotel at 518 Richards St. in downtown Vancouver. Pham was not charged in connection with the incident. “Hotel Canada staff reports that women often come into your room when they shouldn’t, and I believe these women were coming into your room to use drugs. This is extremely dangerous behavior on your part,” McPhalen told the Pham. at the October 2020 IRB hearing. “Vancouver has a very serious problem with people dying of overdoses from fentanyl and other illegal drugs. You provide these people with drugs, and whenever you do that, they’re at risk of dying of an overdose.” In July 2020, a different member of the IRB panel released Pham on 12 conditions that included a promise to reside in a substance abuse facility where he is supposed to receive treatment. She left months later, only to be arrested by Vancouver police after a 911 call from people who said Pham was banging on their door and demanding to come inside.
“Clean for the sake of cleanliness”
At Pham’s final immigration hearing before McPhalen, Logan Sherwood, counsel for the Secretary of Citizenship and Immigration, said the government had “made extensive and sustained efforts to try to obtain travel documents” for Pham from Vietnam by February 2019. Pham’s parents wanted nothing to do with his repatriation. Van Chung Pham was found dead in apartment 16 of the Heatley Block in the Downtown Eastside. The bodies of Noelle O’Soup and another woman were later found in the same unit. (Ben Nelms/CBC) “What seems clear at this point is that the Vietnamese either don’t want to issue a travel document for Mr. Pham or the Vietnamese are making it very difficult,” Sherwood told McFallen. At that point, Pham was being held at the Fraser Regional Correctional Center. Despite being considered a danger to the public, he was not charged with any crime. Members of the immigration court have been criticized in the past for detaining people in criminal facilities on immigration warrants. The prison system was also dealing with cases of COVID in October 2020. McFallen said there does not appear to be any “legitimate immigration purpose” to keep Pham in custody. The attorney representing Pham as a service advisor agreed, saying, “It doesn’t look like he’s going to Vietnam any time, so locking him up is purely for cleanliness — basically.” McFallen asked Sherwood if “it even makes sense to report him” on a regular basis to the CBSA. Sherwood said Pham was not a flight risk. In a statement Monday, an IRB spokesman said the board does not generally comment on decisions, but that “Canadian law considers detention an emergency measure.” The statement said members should take into account the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to determine whether detention is justified, “particularly in cases such as where detention is lengthy or where the prospect of removal has become remote”. Pham was released from immigration detention without a home or job. He was only required to notify the CBSA if he changed address and to report to the CBSA if requested in order to comply with his removal from Canada. It was October 14, 2020. A month later he allegedly sexually assaulted a woman. Sixteen months later, Noelle O’Soup, another woman and Pham were all dead.
