A Must-Read News for my friends from Toronto

It has been almost four years since I left Toronto and moved back to Hong Kong, but I still found this news disturbing.....

A 26-year-old man is dead after being shot in the head in the mobile phone store where he worked inside Markham's Pacific Mall last night.

Kit Chun Cheong of Toronto was shot inside Xsite before being taken to hospital with life-threatening injuries, where he later died. He is York Region's first murder of the year, said Const. Gary Phillips.

A single gunshot was fired in the basement level of the mall around 8:45 p.m., 15 minutes before the building closed for the night.

Steve Wong, a supervisor at Auto Parts in the mall, ran out of his shop to see a man slumped on the floor outside the mobile phone store, surrounded by security guards.

The attacker had already fled the scene.

"It's pretty scary," Wong said.

The mall was mostly empty when the shot was fired, he said. "If it was busier, it could have been bad," he said.

Police don't know the motive but said they are looking for a male shooter, brown or black in complexion, about 6-feet-tall with a thin build, some facial hair, and wearing a black winter jacket.

Officers were stationed around the mall, blocking pedestrians and vehicles from leaving the area after the shooting. A police helicopter circled the area for most of the evening.

"Nobody's leaving until we've collected all the information we can," Const. Cathryn Harris of York Region police said yesterday.

Police are still stationed at the mall, gathering evidence and interviewing witnesses.

Video surveillance was also recovered from the mall.

Wong said he believes the violence will scare away some of the centre's customers.

"People won't want to come. They are shocked," he said.

Pacific Mall, at Kennedy Rd. and Steeles Ave. E., is the largest indoor Asian mall in North America with more than 400 shops.

The mall is infamously known as one of the largest centres of illegal DVD sales on the continent, and police have seized thousands of bootlegged merchandise in raids over the last several years.