Family of victim in murder-for-hire case launches civil suit

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This article was published 15/05/2017 (3096 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In what is believed to be one of the first civil lawsuits of its kind involving a former first-degree murder suspect, the family of a Winnipeg woman who was stabbed to death as part of an alleged murder-for-hire plan is taking the next step in its quest for justice against the man they believe may have orchestrated the killing.

The family of 27-year-old Kaila Tran expects to launch a civil claim by the end of the month. They were given another chance to pursue a wrongful death lawsuit against her former boyfriend after the Manitoba Court of Appeal ruled against his attempt to block the civil suit.

Jamie Kagan, the lawyer representing Tran’s family, including her sister and her stepfather, said they believe Drake David Moslenko planned Tran’s murder in order to get his hands on her life-insurance payout. They want to stop him from getting the money and compel him to reveal more information about what led to Tran’s death. Tran and Moslenko had been in a relationship for several years and they lived together. He’s already received one life-insurance payment despite having been previously accused of first-degree murder in Tran’s death. The insurance payouts could total nearly a quarter of a million dollars, Kagan said.

“There’s no amount of money that’s ever going to make what happened right. The issue here is if what they were told by the police is correct and Mr. Moslenko had some responsibility for this — and that will be determined in court — to see him benefit financially from Kaila’s death is just beyond the family’s ability to comprehend,” said.

“The other thing the family is looking forward to or hoping to see happen is to force Mr. Moslenko in the civil process to answer questions as to what happened, because there’s no right to remain silent in a civil proceeding,” Kagan added.

“From the family’s perspective, they believe there’s a lot of unanswered questions as to Mr. Moslenko’s involvement that they would like to see pursued.”

Tran was ambushed and killed outside of her St. Vital apartment on June 20, 2012. The drug dealer who killed her, Treyvonne Willis, was convicted of first-degree murder after a jury trial in 2015. He confessed, but always claimed another man put him up to it and said he agreed in order to get out of a drug debt. Tran’s family believes her former boyfriend, Moslenko, was the mastermind. He was initally charged with first-degree murder alongside Willis, but the charges against him were dropped in 2014 after Crown prosecutors lost a legal bid to introduce circumstantial evidence that they believed could have linked him to the crime. In an initial video interview with police, Willis implicated someone other than Moslenko, but police found that person had no involvement and charged Moslenko instead.

Tran’s family said they were told by police and the Crown after Willis’s trial that the police had obtained a second videotaped statement from Willis in which he said Moslenko was responsible. The statement was never shown to the jury and Tran’s family is now trying to get access to it. But by the time they found out about its existence, the two-year time period for launching a civil suit had expired, and Tran’s family was granted a court-ordered extension. This appeal court decision, delivered last week, comes after Moslenko tried to block that extension.

In a unanimous, 54-page decision written by Justice Christopher Mainella, the Manitoba Court of Appeal sided with Tran’s family, which has a “reasonable prospect of success at trial,” he wrote in the May 11 decision.

“The reality often is that the pursuit of justice is arduous but that does not mean that it is impossible in difficult circumstances, such as the case here,” Mainella concluded.

katie.may@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @thatkatiemay