Fifty Rifles in a Photograph on a Phone, and a Signal Thread Talking Prices: the Crown Finally Explains in a Kelowna Bail Hearing Why Trail RCMP Shut Highway 3B for a Day in June 2025, and It Started With a Man Running Through Snow (September 12, 2026)

WARFIELD, B.C. — When Trail and Castlegar RCMP closed Highway 3B for several hours on the morning of June 26, 2025 and emptied a property west of Warfield, the force said only that it was a top priority for the detachment and that firearms and stolen vehicles had come out of it. Fifteen months later, at a bail hearing in Kelowna, the Crown explained where the warrant came from: photographs on a seized cellphone showing roughly fifty rifles laid out in a room, and Signal messages discussing what various guns were worth.

The phone belonged to Russell Dobler. Police got it in February 2025, after a traffic stop near Castlegar from which Dobler is alleged to have fled in a truck, later found abandoned near a highway. A police service dog followed footprints through snow, which led officers first to a discarded bag of drugs and then to Dobler himself. A warrant on the phone produced the rifle photographs and the Signal thread, and those became the grounds for the June search.

Why It Took a Year to Charge Anyone

Peltier addressed the delay directly. The “significant number of firearms and other items” recovered at the property took, in his words, quite a while to process given the resources available at the Trail RCMP detachment. Twenty firearms, bulk chemicals and a set of stolen vehicles is a volume of exhibit work that a small West Kootenay detachment absorbs slowly, and all five people arrested on the day walked out while it happened.

That is a plain statement about capacity rather than about the strength of the case, and it is worth recording precisely because a year-long gap between a dramatic raid and any charge tends to be read as something else.

The Bail Argument, and the New Legislation

Peltier sought Sherstobitoff’s continued detention and leaned on recent changes to bail legislation requiring an accused facing firearms charges to clearly demonstrate that a proposed release plan addresses the risk they may pose. “Essentially where it’s kind of borderline or tipping, then the scale should tip towards detention in the Crown’s view,” he said.

He also conceded something that matters to how the file is read: the Crown believes Dobler is the primary individual involved in the alleged trafficking operation. His position on Sherstobitoff was that it would have been plain and obvious to anyone at the property what was going on there.

Selamaj told the court his client has a history of struggling with cocaine use but no prior criminal record, and that between her arrest at the property in June 2025 and her re-arrest this past June once charges were laid, she stayed out of trouble. He raised concerns about her safety and treatment at Okanagan Correctional Centre. Judge Guild granted bail over the Crown’s objection, ordering her to live with a family member under electronic monitoring. The matter returns to Rossland court in October.

The Co-Accused Is Still in Custody, on Something Else Entirely

Dobler has not had the same year. He faces nine criminal charges over an alleged home invasion in Keremeos on March 31, 2026 — one of four men accused of breaking into a home carrying firearms, tying up a woman and failing to get into a safe. Those charges and those of his co-accused remain outstanding. He also faces outstanding drug charges connected to the February 2025 arrest that started all of this. He remains in custody awaiting a bail decision expected later this year.

No Organization Has Been Named

The Crown’s theory as put on the record is a trafficking and firearms operation run out of a rural property, with processing chemicals and scales on site and a phone thread quoting gun prices. That is organized on its face and it is why this file belongs here. But no police force and no prosecutor has attached a gang, a criminal organization or an outlaw motorcycle club to Dobler, to Sherstobitoff or to the Warfield property. No such label is applied in this briefing and no organizational profile on this site is linked from it. Fifty rifles in a photograph is not a club, and a Signal thread about prices names no one but the people in it.

Every allegation above is an allegation. Dobler and Sherstobitoff are presumed innocent, none of the Crown’s assertions has been tested at trial, and the material summarised here was put before a court at a bail hearing rather than proven.