Capital Daily for Monday, July 6

The two people arrested after Friday's assault near Beacon Hill Park are still in custody, and one of them is a youth. VicPD's major crime unit is leading the investigation, and police haven't released a motive or said whether the two groups knew each other.

Victoria police say officers responded just after 10 p.m. Friday to a confrontation involving multiple people near Dallas Road. Three people were hurt, two of them taken to hospital and since released, with injuries police describe as non-life-threatening.

Witnesses have filled in the rest. A young woman who spoke to CHEK said her group had been listening to music near the park when a separate group started lingering nearby. She said one man flipped a knife to his side while asking if they wanted to leave with him. After she pulled her friends back, she said, the man spat on her and the fight began. "He reaches into his back, and he grabs a machete out," she said. "He just started swinging."

A member of the group who spoke to Victoria Buzz, identified only as Abigail, said one friend needs surgery on a hand injury so deep he can't move his fingers. Both witnesses described chasing the suspects toward the Terry Fox memorial, where friends tackled one before officers arrived.

In one long Monday night sitting, the Greater Victoria School Board rewound the clock to January 2025 — before the province fired all nine of them.

The trustees reversed the cuts appointed trustee Sherri Bell had baked into the 2026-27 budget: middle-school music, early childhood educators in kindergarten classes, and the pathways and partnerships program. To pay for the music restoration they leaned on funds raised by Mount Douglas Secondary students, plus money pulled from the trustees' and administration budgets and the district surplus.

They also brought back anonymized monthly reporting of student interactions with police, which Bell had quietly suspended in a February 2025 in-camera meeting. That police-in-schools fight is what got the board fired in the first place.

And they hit pause on the proposed move to a ward system for the fall election, where trustees would be voted in from local areas including the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations. The board wants more from staff first. The province says the bylaws for the election have to be settled by Aug. 4.