TORONTO -- The voices of two young men found murdered and stuffed in the trunk of a car in north Pickering last spring have fallen silent.
But their phones have been doing all kinds of talking.
Durham police homicide detectives say that since obtaining warrants for the four phones belonging to Harjinder Singh Sandhu, 28, and Puneet Singh Chhina, 26, they have managed to not only track the movements of the victims, they have also been able to trace the steps of their killers.
And that has allowed them to zero in on a Scarborough neighbourhood where it's believed the pair were slain and where the murderers may still be hiding out.
"Our warrants on the cellular phones of the victims have now shown us that they went to a specific area in Scarborough," Det. Mitch Martin said yesterday, explaining that investigators have been able to determine which cell towers each phone "reached out to" that fateful day.
On May 4, Sandhu and Chhina left a home in Brampton and headed east to the area of Kennedy Rd. and Sheppard Ave. E., where friends claim they were to visit "an associate."
"We believe they were abducted and quite likely murdered at that location," Martin said.
"The victims had four phones, two each," he explained. "Three of the phones never left the area of Kennedy and Sheppard. But this one phone made the trip out to Durham and then went to Stouffville and back to Scarborough."
It's believed the killers took three of the victims' phones after beating and shooting them to death in Scarborough. But when they were dumping the bodies near Rosebank Rd. and the 4th Concession, in a rural part of Pickering, they found a fourth in the car.
"They took that fourth phone with them and for some reason travelled north to Stouffville before heading back to the Kennedy and Sheppard area," Martin said, adding the phones all "went dormant" after May 4.
Officers canvassed that area yesterday hoping for new information in the seven- month-old case.
"We were asking folks if they remembered anything from back on May 4 and if they recognized the vehicle the two deceased men were found in," Martin said.
Police have said little about the motive behind the gangland-style double murder, but sources say it may have to do with an unpaid cocaine debt.
Sandhu, a married father of two girls who lived in Brampton, was due in court June 1 to face charges for allegedly smuggling 30 kilos of cocaine -- worth about $3.8 million -- across the border in a transport truck in 2007.
Chhina, who moved to the GTA from Nepean hoping to find work as a truck driver, appears to have simply got caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.
CHRIS.DOUCETTE@SUNMEDIA.CA
