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The slain man would have also turned 24 next week.

Homicide detectives believe the fatal shooting, the city’s first homicide of the 2018, was targeted.

Dakhil’s brother Meshal Dakhil said he didn’t want to speak to a reporter about Tarek’s death. The slain man was one of six siblings in a family that now mourns him. A large group of family members waited for news about Tarek at The Ottawa Hospital’s Civic campus after the shooting. Several teens — including friends of the victim — had gathered across the street Tuesday night after the Dakhil family spread word about what had happened.

On Wednesday afternoon, just before Ottawa police officers began searching the large snow-covered courtyard with metal detectors for any bullets or spent casings, a young man walked up to the police tape and stood silently, shaking his head, visibly upset.

Dakhil was a former Brookfield High School student. He played basketball and was part of a team that won the National Capital Secondary School Athletic Association boys’ senior championship in 2013.

Johar Syed went to primary and high school with Dakhil and said he was a good friend who “never looked down on anyone around him.

“He always found himself in the centre of everything because of his infectious personality and humour,” Syed said. Dakhil really loved his friends, he said.

The young man, however, had had his share of brushes with the law.

In October 2016, Dakhil was sentenced to six months in jail and 18 months’ probation for a series of offences dating back to 2014, with the most recent occurring in 2016. All told, he was convicted of criminal harassment, making a death threat, unlawfully being inside a home to commit a crime, assaulting six people — one of whom he hit with a Grey Goose vodka bottle — possessing a knife for a dangerous purpose, obstructing police and breaching several conditions imposed on him by the court.