Police confirmed Tuesday the woman found dead a day earlier in Burnaby's Warner Loat Park was a sex-trade worker.
Homicide investigators are now speaking to other sex workers along the same stroll 27-year-old Carla Marie Smith was known to frequent to learn if anyone had seen her in her final hours.
"It's an assumption we're taking," said Cpl. Dale Carr. "We want to firm up a time-line about when she was last on the street."
Coroners had yet to confirm how Smith, a woman with several run-ins with the law, died.
Carr added the RCMP had not increased patrols in the area where Smith worked, but encouraged sex workers to take steps to ensure their safety such as staying in contact with others.
Sex worker Susan Davis said another murdered worker had created a heightened awareness of violence against sex workers within her community.
Davis worked the Vancouver streets off-and-on in the early 1990s. She spoke of how she needed to make snap decisions on whether she felt safe with a prospective john.
"When you're working on the street, you have to look around, look in the car, make sure they don't have a knife or a rope," she said.
Anyone with information is asked to call police at 1-877- 551-4448
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Sketch
- Reporter
- Dharm Makwana currently serves as a web editor at The Province, British Columbia's best read daily newspaper. For more than four years he wrote on issues affecting the Lower Mainland for the province's third largest daily newspaper Vancouver 24 hours. Before arriving in Vancouver in January 2007, Dharm won the John Lott Scholarship for outstanding journalism at Centennial College. Since then Dharm has developed an interest in municipal and provincial politics, crime and policing and social issues including immigration, prostitution and trafficking. He is currently working on a series of stories involving Vancouver's sex workers.
Wisdom
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-Bill Murray
-Bill Murray