murder case and linked the London, Ontario, homicide to an Iranian-Canadian man, who has now been charged with first-degree murder.
Roshan Norouzali, an Iranian army deserter who has been involved in a string of murders and violent robberies in Canada, lived in a rooming house near to where the late Lawrence Kitakijick once slept on the streets of London. Kitakijick’s naked body was found by passersby in 1992. His body was riddled with multiple gunshots in the head and torso; his throat had been slashed. Kitakijick was a First Nations person, the Canadian term for what Americans call an American Indian. He was an Ojibwa.
An investigation produced no suspects, Kitakijick’s death was not, however, forgotten by the victim’s sister, Tiffany Kitakijick. Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) Det.-Insp. Ian Maule reported that Tiffany contacted the unsolved homicide investigation team in late-2007 asking if her brother’s case was still being investigated. She had not heard from the police in several years.
In response to her requests, three DNA samples found at the crime scene were re-submitted to the Center for Forensic Sciences in April 2008, at which point Norouzali’s DNA was found to match. DNA testing wasn’t available in 1992. But three years later, in 1995, police were able to develop a DNA profile. The profile, however, yielded no match at that time as Norouzali’s DNA was not on file then.
Maule told the North Bay Nugget that Norouzali had not been a suspect in the original investigation 18 years prior. Police had initially tracked a list of Kitakijick’s acquaintances, but each of them was eliminated as a suspect. The DNA data bank, however, was what finally linked Norouzali to the murder. Norouzali’s DNA was also key in convicting Norouzali of two previous murders. In 1998, he was convicted in the 1994 murder of an Ontario man near Toronto, who was killed execution-style—with four bullets in the head—for his car. Norouzali and accomplice Ronald Woodcock then used that car to go to the Gagnon Sports shop in Oshawa where they burst in with guns and fired several times, killing the owner. Norouzali’s blood was later found by police on the glass display case that he had broken to steal firearms.
On November 5, the OPP announced that the 47-year-old Norouzali, who would have been 28 at the time of Kitakijick’s murder, had been charged with first-degree murder in the shooting death of the Ojibwa man. Maule declined to say whether there was a sexual component to the crime, beyond noting that the victim was naked.
Norouzali, who is already serving a life sentence for the two earlier murders, was a member of a notorious gang, the Balaclava Bandits, that terrorized banks and grocery stores 15 years ago in the London area.