‘Who killed my son?’ — grieving mom

Kathryn Snell wants to know who killed her son Kyle Marud before she dies.

In between sobs, Snell begged for some justice for her loved son, who was killed in a walkway behind the Aldergrove Safeway store one year ago on Tuesday.

“I’m sick and I want to know. I need justice,” said Snell, who has since moved from Aldergrove, unable to live so close to where Marud was killed.

He died less than 800 feet from her doorstep. She feels guilt every day that she couldn’t help him or be there in his last moments of life.

“There’s not one day I haven’t cried over my son. When Christmas came, I thought I was going to die. When Easter came, he was at the table...”

Snell was diagnosed with cancer in August and is fighting it as best she can.

“I think I got sick from the stress, from waking up every day in so much pain in my heart,” she said on the anniversary of her son’s death. “I have so much anger, so much hurt. If these people who killed Kyle ever become parents and they were to lose that child, then they’d know what I’m going through.”

She said Kyle was on his way home the night he was killed. When he was found, he still had a bag of chips and pop with him.

“I don’t know who did it, but I think there were more than one. Wouldn’t you think the parents would notice there’s something different with their child?”

“It breaks my heart I couldn’t even comfort my son,” she said.

“He wasn’t about fighting back. He was awkward, half blind and skinny. If someone wanted the money out of his pocket, he would have given it to them,” she said.

“Aldergrove is not talking, but somebody knows what happened that night.”

She believes there are Aldergrove residents out there who know what happened, but don’t want to get involved or don’t want to testify.

To that, she begs them to say something and help her know the truth before she dies.

“Do it for Kyle, the rest of his life was stripped from him.”

Marud’s last movements were cashing a paycheque Saturday, and making a stop at the local 7-Eleven to pick up a bag of chips and a pop. It was the last time anyone saw the young man alive.

Police estimate Marud was murdered sometime after 1:30 a.m. His body was found behind Countryside Shopping Centre, in the 27500-block of Fraser Highway — still a popular place for his friends and family to hang out and the site of a spray painted mural and a memorial in dedication of Marud, who would have turned 20 on Jan. 9.

While police are no further in the investigation, the Integrated Homicide Investigation Team spokesman Cpl. Dale Carr said this isn’t a cold case.

“We want to assure the Langley community this is not a file that has been boxed up and put away,” he said.

“We’ve had a number of tips over the past year and we’ve followed them up. Speed isn’t the important thing here, direction is and we feel we have a clear direction.”

There were some challenges to this case in the beginning, with many young people coming forward pretending to be friends with Marud.

“We would interview them and find out they weren’t really friends but people on the peripheral of Kyle’s life.”

Snell can’t believe how tight-lipped Aldergrove youth are being.

Marud had many friends in the community and more than 200 showed up to his funeral.

“Everybody knew Kyle and his dog (Taz). Kyle walked every block of that place.

He was a walker,” said Snell.

His mother wants people to know about the kind of person Marud was.

He was compassionate and an animal lover.

“That kid worked every day. He’s special needs, you know, and they said he would never walk properly, but he did,” she said of the son she adopted at eight weeks old, drug-addicted and born with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome.

She said he’d take the bus at 6 a.m. from Safeway into work at a mechanic shop in Surrey and back again, and worked like a “dog,” and came home every day the same way.

He was also generous with the money he earned and Snell said many kids in Aldergrove knew that. Before Christmas, some destroyed his memorial and Safeway paid to have it cleaned up.

“Whoever did the vandalism doesn’t have any respect for the dead.

“How are they going to have respect for the living?”

Marud was proud of being a hard worker and often could be found working at an Aldergrove cafe on Sundays to pick up extra cash.

“He was born with a lot of problems. No one wanted him and I took him,” she said of the son she took custody of in Saskatchewan. She also adopted two daughters.

She said Kyle’s ashes will be buried in Saskatchewan, along with her father’s, but she just hasn’t been able to bring herself to make the trip.

“I just haven’t had the will to go there. I was stripped of my son. My daughters were stripped of their brother, and his friends ... and he had friends. He was stripped of his life.

“My God, he was just starting to become a man. He paid taxes, he worked...he was just coming home to watch a movie,” she sobbed.

“I think a bunch of punks swarmed him. He was chased home a few times.

“He said ‘“I don’t think I’m going to be around her very much longer.’ I said “What do you mean? We never knew what he meant.”

“This is Aldergrove. It’s a small community. How can this happen?”

— With files from Elaine Morrison, Aldergrove Star.