A Brant County man already connected to multiple homicides in Brantford and Toronto is charged in another: the 2019 slaying of a 22-year-old Hamilton man.
According to court documents, Salloum Jassem, 33, known as Sal or Sally, of Pinehill Drive in the Fox Hill Estates development off Colborne Street West, is charged with first-degree murder in the shooting death of Coby (Kareem) Carter.
Carter was found dead on July 8, 2019, in Brantford on Colborne Street West, near Gilkison Street. At the time, police said his homicide was a “planned and deliberate act.”
Jassem is also charged with conspiring with two unknown people in the summer of 2018 to murder Carter and conspiring with Abdelaziz Ibrahim, Thomas Sliwinski, Tina Flear and one other unknown person during the first week of June 2019 to kill Carter.
Last April, Ibrahim was charged with first-degree murder in Carter’s death.
Sliwinski and Flear were charged on March 7 with murder and conspiracy to commit murder.
The case is under the umbrella of the Ontario Provincial Police and Project Grantham, which was created in response to the murder of Carter and the shooting deaths 10 days later of Larry Reynolds and Lynn Van Every in their Brantford home.
The OPP have not announced the most recent charges and have declined further comment, saying the project “remains an ongoing and active investigation.”
At the time Project Grantham was established, police said they believed Carter’s death was not connected to the Reynolds-Van Every homicides.
Jassem also faces first-degree murder charges in the deaths of Reynolds and Van Every.
He is also charged with conspiracy to commit murder in the 2018 shooting death of a 33-year-old Toronto tow-truck driver, Soheil Rafipour.
In 2017, Jassem was arrested, along with his brother, after an assault on a group of people in Niagara Falls, Ont.,
He also was arrested, along with three others, after a man was kidnapped from his Brantford home and assaulted.
In 2018, Brantford police charged Jassem with possession of cocaine and fentanyl for trafficking.
Later that year, his brother, Jassem Hamdi Jassem, was arrested on drug charges, with Roger Van Every, the son of Lynn Van Every and Larry Reynolds, at a large home in Jerseyville. Jassem Jassem was eventually convicted and sentenced in a Brampton court to prison. Van Every was bailed out by his parents, who agreed to act as his sureties.
On July 18, 2019, Reynolds and Van Every were killed in what was called, in court, a botched contract killing that was targeting Roger Van Every.
A total of eight people have been charged in the Reynolds-Van Every killings. One, Kareem Zedan, pleaded guilty in April 2021 to two counts of manslaughter and was sentenced to 15 years in prison. Court was told he was not the shooter.
In May 2020, after two raids on the Pinehill Drive home owned by their mother, Salloum Jassem and Seif Jassem were arrested by York Regional Police in connection with an ongoing investigation of tow-truck violence. Salloum Jassem was charged with conspiracy to commit murder and arson, plus drug trafficking and firearms offences.
Salloum Jassem’s earlier charges in the Reynolds-Van Every death have been moving through the Superior Court of Justice and return in May for reassignment.
His new charges of murder in connection with Carter are back in court next week in Brantford and Newmarket to be updated.
For his part, Roger Van Every is to stand trial, along with a Hamilton-area man, in a triple shooting in February 2020 at a Brantford motel that left one man dead and two others injured.
@EXPSGamble