Vancouver police have responded to an incident in Marpole near the intersection of 64th Avenue and Hudson Street where two people have died.

A VPD media release describes the deaths as “suspicious” and adds that detectives from the force’s homicide unit are taking over the investigation.

 That’s all the information police have released so far, but @ScanBC, a Twitter account that reliably reports on police radio chatter in the region, posted a message at 2:46 p.m. stating that “Neighbours reported a hatchet and blood trailing out of a house”.

https://twitter.com/ScanBC/status/913157889128153088

In recent months, there’s been an unusual number of homicides as well as nonfatal shootings across Metro Vancouver. Most have occurred south of the Fraser River.

Last weekend (September 23 and 24), there were three separate shootings in Surrey. No one was reported injured in those attacks.

A couple of days later, on September 26, a man presented himself with a gunshot wound at a hospital in Surrey. The RCMP has said that it suspects he was wounded in the Cloverdale area.

Earlier last week, on September 18, a man was shot dead in Richmond. His body was found in the 7500 block of Bridge Street.

That incident follows a series of shootings in Surrey, Langley, and Abbotsford that occurred through late August and early September. The most recent of those attacks left five people dead in less than a week.

It remains unclear how many of the shootings, if any, are related to one another. In each instance, however, police have said that the target of the attack did not appear to be random.