Woman describes in warrant how serial offender lured her to suite where Noelle O'Soup was later found dead

An unsealed court document has revealed more details about how a man deemed a "danger to the public" apparently lured women to his Downtown Eastside apartment, where his body — and, later, the bodies of a woman and a missing Indigenous girl — were found last year. 

The CBC went to court in November 2022 to unseal a search warrant executed by the Vancouver Police Department (VPD) in Van Chung Pham's home in February 2021, as officers investigated a complaint of sexual assault.

Pham was charged with the offence in February 2022, just a week before police found his body in the suite at 405 Heatley Ave. where they would later discover the remains of 14-year-old Noelle O'Soup and the unnamed woman — which they missed when officers found Pham.

The deaths of Noelle, of the Key First Nation in Saskatchewan, and the unnamed woman remain under investigation by the VPD's Major Crimes Unit. Pham was deemed to have died of an overdose.

The search warrant details the lengths police went in their attempts to locate a suspect identified only by a phone number, the name "Jimmy," and the few things the alleged victim could recall from the scene of the crime.

But taken together with a raft of immigration documents previously obtained by CBC that revealed Pham's involvement in the overdose death of another woman — and how he was released with virtually no restrictions when it became apparent that attempts to deport him from Canada were futile — the warrant raises as many questions as it answers.

Most notably: How could a man deemed a "danger to the public" by immigration officials and ordered deported end up living among some of the country's most vulnerable citizens, selling drugs and allegedly preying on women?

The search warrant says VPD Const. Dijana Mehic obtained the document to search Pham's apartment on Feb. 5, 2021, three months after a Burnaby RCMP officer told her a woman alleging sexual assault was waiting to be examined at Burnaby General Hospital.

Later that day, Nov. 19, 2020, the RCMP officer told Mehic the victim left the hospital before he could get any identification.

According to the warrant, Mehic couldn't find any information about the woman on a national police database, so she sent an internal email to VPD officers working the Downtown Eastside "to advise if they have dealt with or deal with a female by this name."

Two days later, she was contacted by a beat enforcement officer who knew the victim.

Mehic said she went to the woman's residence and "she advised me that she did attend [the hospital] on Nov. 19, 2020, after having been sexually assaulted by a male friend of hers who she knows only as 'Jimmy.'"

"She described herself as a recreational drug user, but advised she is not a sex trade worker and has never participated in the sex trade," the warrant reads. 

"When she ran into 'Jimmy,' he offered her free drugs in exchange for hanging out with him. Not assuming anything of 'Jimmy,' she agreed to hang out with 'Jimmy' for the day, enticed by the free drug offer."