A swath of scrub between hydro poles, small copse of trees beyond, postwar middle-class homes abutting one side, golf course on the other.
Fourteen-year-old Adrian Johnston was killed here late Monday afternoon – executed, sounds like – with nearby residents trying to comfort the boy, if only so that his mother might know he didn't die alone.
"He's just a baby, without any hair on his chin," a neighbour trained in CPR who'd attempted chest compressions told reporters afterwards. "I kept saying, `Talk to me baby, talk to me.'"
But the neighbour knew it was a lost cause, recognized the gurgling death rattle in the teenager's lungs.
An urban field in Toronto's west end, near The Junction, not historically a district of guns and gangs violence and maybe there was no gang involvement here, though there certainly was a gun: Adrian shot in the chest, stomach and shoulder.
Witnesses have told police they saw the youth walking along Scarlett Rd. shortly beforehand, in the company of another male, the latter's description so generic as to be useless – black male, black hoodie, black bandana. If surveillance video exists from which a better identification might be made, investigators weren't saying so. That's unlikely, however, or police would have released the images already.
They'd walked into the field together, these two males, but only the suspected shooter walked out, ran out.
Adjoining neighbourhoods – as defined by police districts – have more typically been the scene of street violence in the past and residents worry now about spillover, seepage, of turf wars or drug wars into their region. At least two gangs are known to operate in the vicinity – Gators and Five Point Generals.
In the past month, this district has experienced a gush of gun violence killing:
May 1: Jarvis St. Remy, found bleeding on the sidewalk near Scarlett and Dundas St. The 18-year-old had just left his best friend's apartment and was waiting alone at a bus shelter for a ride home. Two people approached, fired several shots and fled.
April 22: Omar Waite, 29, shot at a TTC bus stop on the corner of Jane and Eglinton, at the height of rush hour traffic.
April 21: Daniel Lewis, 19, gunned down in an alleyway just off Dunraven Dr. Witnesses reported hearing Lewis shout, before the fusillade: "Don't disrespect me!"
Both Lewis and Waite were purported to have been members of street gangs, rivals, with convictions for robbery and assault.
Those facts illuminate the subtext of their murders – and dim the horror. Gang involvement distances their fate from the city in which they lived; at the very least, compartmentalizes the violence as part and parcel of the choices they made, to run in such circles.
Because it's not us, the innocents going about our daily lives, who bled out on the pavement – not a pretty white schoolgirl out shopping with her sister on Boxing Day, nor a young woman enjoying cake and coffee at a midtown café, nor the father of a little boy rushing to catch the subway home, shot in the head outside a Yonge Strip peeler bar. Those memorable deaths were all random or tragically circumstantial – wrong place, wrong time – but it could have been you or me. So we take them to heart and grieve a little bit, vicariously.
A healthy city is the sum of its parts, however, and its neighbourhoods, all of them. The gangs, the guns, the violence, the individual losses borne by families – we do metaphysically share in this, in the ravaging of a metropolis that doesn't feel so safe anymore.
It's not enough to say, as if whistling by the graveyard, this isn't New York or Baltimore or Washington, D.C. A decade ago, senior police officials also said there were no real gangs in Toronto, just wannabes. They were wrong or deliberately withholding the truth, as if we couldn't handle the truth.
Toronto remains a vibrant, largely safe city where one needn't be afraid to walk the streets at night or read on a park bench. Having said that, though, it is absurd to take refuge in crime indicators, such as those recently released by Statistics Canada, claiming Toronto has the lowest crime rate of any major city in Canada, and that crime figures nationally have fallen by 15 per cent since 1998.
Violent crime in Toronto has gone up. Home invasions in Toronto have gone up. The sense of risk – what we feel in our bones – has gone up. It is naïve, classically blinkered, to pretend both reality and impressions have been overwrought, manipulated by media and scaremongers.
Only our collective shock over violence has subsided. That, and empathy.
A 14-year-old boy is shot to death and – for most – it's just a shrug, turn the page. Maybe not at Adrian's school – he was in Grade 9 at Runnymede Collegiate – where distraught students were huddled and tearful, submitting to the ministrations of psychologists and grief counsellors. "The kids are sad, it's solemn, it's subdued," said principal Lynn Farquharson.
And maybe not among homicide cops, who took pains yesterday to detach this dead youth from the slew of recent murders in 12 Division, the estranging stigma of gang violence. Adrian, while "known to police" had no criminal record. Police are well aware that a gang-killing designation will make the public care just that much less.
He was a boy, for the love of God. A tear rolled down his baby-face cheek as he lay dying.
A field ... a laneway ... a TTC stop. If we don't care – mourn only the nice white girls from fine families – then we deserve the city without pity Toronto is becoming.
Rosie DiManno usually appears Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.
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