VANCOUVER — A father from Vancouver shot dead in his Costa Rican home appears to be the victim of a targeted hit, according to a private investigator in the Central American country.
Brad Deering, 42, and three others were inside his gated-community home in San José Thursday morning, when three men stormed the house, shot and killed Deering and tied up the others. San José is the capital of Costa Rica.
According to a Costa Rica private investigator, Douglas Smith, local police are calling the attack a home invasion, but “that doesn’t make sense.”
“This wasn’t a household robbery, this was a hit,” Smith said from his office in Costa Rica. “They had one intention and one intention alone of capping him.”
While Smith isn’t investigating the case, he was made aware of the slaying by close friends of Deering.
According to Smith, three men dressed as security personnel fooled a guard outside Deering’s home into letting them in by claiming they were there to fix an alarm system.
They tied up the guard, crashed Deering’s home and tied up three of the four people inside while Deering tried to escape. The intruders shot Deering three times.
“A home invasion usually is at night and they crash the doors, crash the gates and ... most of the time in home invasions, they wait for people not to be there,” Smith said. “In this case they went in prepared, tied people up in broad daylight. It doesn’t measure up as a home invasion.”
Smith said Deering “sold futures” in Costa Rica — an unregulated and a dangerous business in that country.
“Buying futures as an investment is the most dangerous, most speculative investment you can possibly do,” he said. “Buying them from any broker in Costa Rica you’re playing in the twilight zone.”
Futures are financial contracts obliging the buyer to purchase an asset (or the seller to sell an asset) at a predetermined date and price. Futures markets are characterized by the ability to use high leverage relative to stock markets.
Smith speculates that someone targeted Deering because they either lost money in a deal with him, or simply because his wealth was known. He owned three fancy cars and lived in a high-end home.
“He had all the toys in the world,” Smith said. “He made himself a target in Costa Rica.”
According to Smith, those who knew Deering had “nothing but nice things” to say about him. He also had a young daughter from a previous marriage.
The Canadian consulate did not respond to media requests for information by deadline, but since Deering’s murder an advisory warning to “exercise a high degree of caution” when travelling to Costa Rica has been posted on a Government of Canada travel website.
“There is no nationwide advisory for Costa Rica. However, you should exercise a high degree of caution and be vigilant at all times due to increasing levels of violent crime,” the advisory reads.
