Communities That Fail Their Neighbors

A second example of the cone of silence arising in a social housing project......

A brutal death, and the silence that follows
Christie Blatchford

When Omar Wellington was killed in the summer of 2006, I was in Afghanistan; I didn't even hear about the case.

When I did learn about it, shortly before the judge-alone trial of five young men began in Ontario Superior Court yesterday, the story was so awful it seemed to me that it could have happened in Kandahar, where life is so cheap, the violence so ordinary and spectacular both.

Yet Omar's slaying occurred in what is due to the sprawl of Toronto now considered mid-town, in an area called Flemingdon Park in the Don Mills Road-Eglinton Avenue East part of the city. It is just a little east and south of the Ontario Science Centre, mecca for tourists and schoolchildren alike.

It was in a subsidized housing development there on July 14 three years ago that the 17-year-old was beaten, humiliated and essentially tortured before being knifed to death. At autopsy, his battered body revealed 31 stab wounds - including a penetrating injury to the jugular vein on the right side of his neck - and 39 associated cuts to his face, neck and torso. That doesn't count a multitude of other kinds of lacerations and abrasions to his upper body and face.

Omar also had been stripped to his boxer shorts and, bloodied, paraded about as one caller to Crime Stoppers later reported he had been told, like a hostage. The ordeal had begun about 5 p.m. and lasted at least 4½ hours.

At the time, Toronto Police estimated as many as 100 people may have seen or heard parts of the protracted beating. No one, including a private security officer employed at the complex who saw Omar in his boxers at one point or a woman who saw part of the assault and returned a second time and saw that now people were throwing bottles at Omar or a man who gathered his own youngsters close and took them home when he saw what was going on, phoned 911.

Police ran smack into a wall of silence, what trial Judge Brian Trafford described, in a lengthy pre-trial ruling, as "a culture of fear, based upon intimidation and threats of death or serious bodily harm." Judge Trafford noted that at least three of the witnesses in the case had been told to "close their mouths, watch what they say and mind their business" or otherwise threatened.

Rest of the story......