North Central pastor saddened, but unfazed by nearby homicide

The pastor of a church close to where Regina’s third homicide victim was found on Saturday said he couldn’t sleep after police came knocking past midnight, asking for the building’s surveillance footage.

Jordan D’Almeida, who leads The Oasis on 7th Avenue and Garnet Street, said he was kept up by the sad news.

“After this, you don’t go back to bed right away. I’m just thinking it’s such a waste of life, such a waste of human capital, such a waste because it really didn’t have to be this way,” D’Almeida said.

There didn’t seem to be much fear in D’Almeida, who has lived in North Central for 14 years by choice, raising a family there.

He said his home has been broken into several times before and doesn’t minimize the problems of the area — poverty, addiction, crime, and people getting caught in cycles of abuse.

Those problems do appear to be getting worse in his view, and based on anecdotes, D’Almeida believes they’re being driven by drugs — crystal meth, specifically.

“That drug is really causing a huge negative impact on a lot of people,” he said.

The pastor said he has served in poor places overseas and felt called to the neighbourhood.

His goal for The Oasis is to be a safe place and a community hub.

“To break down some of the socioeconomic walls, break down some of the racial divides,” he said. “Our job is that we can look at each other, and like Jesus says, to love each other, to love your neighbour as yourself and just treat each other with human dignity.”

He gets along with his neighbours, saying living in North Central has been an enriching experience for its cultural diversity and mix of income levels.

“All those things we hear on the news, they’re a real problem, but I don’t want that to cloud over all the person-to-person relationships we have in the neighbourhood,” he said.

D’Almeida floats some ideas to address the community’s ills, like funding social programs or fixing Indigenous relations, but he doesn’t pretend to know what the antidote would be.

Instead, his confidence is in a principle he swears by.

“If you want to have a good neighbourhood, you be a good neighbour. Caring for the people around you and making small changes within your community is the best way to do it,” he said.