SWEENEY o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2003-12-30 published
witnesses: are silent as the slain weep
By Christie
BLATCHFORD,
Tuesday,
December▼ 30, 2003 - Page A1
Even on its face, what unfolded in two parts of the Beechwood Cemetery at noon yesterday is a gripping story.
There, in Section 7, the family of Godfrey "Junior"
DUNBAR --
including his three astonishingly beautiful children, aged 12,
8 and 7 -- were holding a vigil for their lost son, brother and
father at his grave. Mr.
DUNBAR and Richard
BROWN, respectively
27 and 29 years old, were gunned down precisely four years earlier
at a North York nightclub jammed with upward of 800 people.
The case went cold and has stayed that way -- Toronto police
offered a $50,000 reward yesterday as a last resort -- not because
it isn't solvable, not for a lack of potential witnesses, but
rather because none of those witnesses, including many Friends of the two men, is talking.
Among those who were at the Connections II club that night and
who would not tell detectives what they saw was one Kirk
SWEENEY.
And who was being buried yesterday in Section 17 of the cemetery,
about 400 metres away from the vigil? None other than young Mr.
SWEENEY, himself the victim of an execution-style killing just
before Christmas at a downtown club called the G Spot.
There was a big crowd of mourners at the mound of fresh earth
by his grave. Funerals for the young black men who form the city's
largest single group of homicide victims are always well attended,
as Mr. DUNBAR's terrific older sister, Trisha, noted yesterday.
At her brother's, for instance, she remembered, people did what
they could to console the family. "But money is not what we wanted,"
she said. "We wanted for one of them to come forward." It is
the cruellest irony, she said, that her brother, who so "valued
Friendship," should have been betrayed by those who were with him the night he died.
At the vigil, the crowd was tiny, composed only of relatives,
media (invited because the
DUNBARs are hoping renewed publicity
will see someone belatedly speak up) and other black mothers who have lost sons to gun violence.
One of them was Yvonne
BEASLEY.
I'd been told her son had been
killed, and after introducing myself, asked if the case had been
solved. She looked at me as though I was mad. "Oh," she said, "they're all unsolved."
"What was your son's name?" I asked, apologizing for not remembering.
"I don't blame you," she said. "There have been so many."
Her boy was Sydney
HEMMANS.
One day shy of his 19th birthday,
in July, 2001, he was shot and killed in his old downtown neighbourhood.
"Were there witnesses?" I asked Ms.
BEASLEY. "
There are always
witnesses," she said. "That's why all us moms are here."
Another was Julia
FARQUHARSON, whose 24-year-old son, Segun,
was shot and killed on May 17, 2001, the victim of what began
as an attempted robbery and ended in an utterly senseless murder.
Mr. FARQUHARSON was carrying his basketball at the time of his
death, and, realizing the gravity of the situation he was in,
had called his own cellphone's voicemail to secretly record the
voices of the two men wanting to rob him. That two-minute call,
played publicly by homicide detectives not long after Mr.
FARQUHARSON's
murder, is a terrifying mélange of Mr.
FARQUHARSON clutching
his basketball and pleading for his life, and one of his attackers shrieking, "Yo, let me fucking kill you, dude."
Police were hoping someone would recognize the voices on the
tape, and call them. That was more than two years ago. They continue
to wait, and despite a recent $50,000 reward, Mr.
FARQUHARSON's slaying remains unsolved.
That is one of the other stories here -- that police, despite
dogged work and the fact that so many of these killings take
place in public places, cannot successfully close these cases
without witnesses: willing to testify and that, on the rare occasion
they are able to get a case to court, the witnesses: are by then
demonstrably unreliable, having given several versions of what they saw before belatedly telling the truth.
All of this goes to undermine the administration of justice.
But the other, broader story is that because of the intimate
connections that often exist among the slain and their killers
and the mute witnesses: to their deaths -- and the fact that so
much of the gun violence in Toronto is committed by young black
men upon other young black men -- there is a growing cynicism, captured in an e-mail I got yesterday.
In Monday's paper, I'd written about the case of Adrian Roy
BAPTISTE,
a handsome 21-year-old who was shot five times, in broad daylight,
last Saturday, just eight days after he was found not guilty
by a properly constituted jury, and freed, in another shooting in Hamilton almost two years previous.
This is what the note said: "Let them all shoot each other. Leave
the rest of us in peace. And let God sort it all out. Enough said."
I understand the weariness there, but strongly disagree.
The killing spree now going on in the city -- not the first one,
merely the latest -- is not a problem confined to the lawless,
and it ought not to be left to the black community to solve.
There are often perfectly innocent victims, and even those with
lengthy criminal records die so young that they never get the
proverbial second chance that ought to be a given in a civilized society.
Junior DUNBAR's mother, Jamela, bent low in the rain yesterday
and whispered to her son's tombstone, "You had so many Friends.
None of them came forward to speak on your behalf; no one has
the decency. Where are your Friends now?" His older son, Marquel,
left a little drawing of him and his dad holding hands.
The baby son, D'angelo, stood with his small face utterly stricken,
his big sister, Deondra, keeping an arm around him.
Aside from a few reporters, the only white face at the vigil
belonged to Gary
BRENNAN, the detective who was one of the original
investigators of Mr.
DUNBAR's killing; he has moved to another squad now, but still was good enough to show up.
It's rarely the cops who have to be motivated to give a damn. It's the rest of us.
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SWEENEY o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2003-12-31 published
Slain man was central to case that altered confession rule
By Christie
BLATCHFORD,
Wednesday,
December▲ 31, 2003 - Page A7
The late Kirk Alexander
SWEENEY, who was buried just this week,
may be best remembered by the general public as one of a number
of young black men gunned down over the Christmas holidays.
Toronto homicide detectives may think instead of how crude street
justice got Mr.
SWEENEY in the end: He was, they say, essentially
executed at the G-Spot nightclub in the early-morning hours of December 22.
The handsome 26-year-old allegedly had been a witness, four years
ago, to a double murder that took place at another crowded club.
But Mr. SWEENEY, like dozens and dozens of others who were within
an arm's length of the victims, refused to tell police what he
knew of the shooting of Godfrey (Junior)
DUNBAR and Richard
BROWN.
The result of their collective silence has been that those two
slayings remain unsolved, the killer or killers still at large.
And now, of course, the same hear-, see-, and speak-no-evil rule
appears to be applying to the investigation of Mr.
SWEENEY's
slaying. Detectives find few people who were within eyeshot, among the crowd of 150, willing to co-operate.
But Mr. SWEENEY made a rather more lasting contribution to Canadian
criminal law -- aside, that is, from compiling a not unimpressive
record of his own on various weapons-related offences.
In the fall of 2000, he was the person at the centre of an important
legal case, the outcome of which made it far more difficult for
police to get suspects to talk and virtually impossible for prosecutors
to take any resulting confessions to court if even a hint of a whiff of a threat had been used to obtain them.
The background goes like this.
On December 31, 1996, a taxi driver -- a hard-working new immigrant
picked up two men and drove them to a townhouse complex in Toronto.
One man, allegedly Mr.
SWEENEY, was in the front passenger seat,
the other in the rear. Once they reached their destination, the
man in the front switched off the ignition, while the rear passenger
purportedly put his arm around the driver's neck.
The man in the front then allegedly pointed a gun at the driver, threatened to kill him, and demanded his money.
As the driver was reaching to get it, he told police later, the man in the front pistol-whipped him about the head.
The two men fled with the money; the police were called, and
within an hour, a police dog was tracking a scent from the cab
to the rear entrance of the townhouse of Mr.
SWEENEY's family.
As Mr. SWEENEY left the home, he was arrested, along with another suspect.
Mr. SWEENEY subsequently made two statements to police.
One officer said if Mr.
SWEENEY could tell them where the gun
was, they would not have to execute a search warrant on his mother's home.
Mr. SWEENEY told the detective he had thrown the weapon out a window, but police still couldn't find it.
At Mr. SWEENEY's original trial, Judge David
HUMPHREY disallowed
the statement on the grounds that it was the product of "an inducement" by the detective.
But Mr. SWEENEY gave another statement.
A second officer said police had prepared a search warrant for
the house -- this was true -- and told Mr.
SWEENEY that officers
would "trash" the house, looking for the gun, if he didn't tell
them where it was. Mr.
SWEENEY apparently hesitated, and the
officer added, "Your mom is already upset. Just be a man and
make this easier for her." Mr.
SWEENEY told the officer the gun
was in a box in his mother's closet, and even drew a little diagram for him.
The police executed the warrant and, as sure as cats like litter,
found the gun, right where Mr.
SWEENEY said it was.
At trial, Judge
HUMPHREY concluded -- sensibly, I'd argue, to
the average Joe -- that this statement was also the result of
an inducement, and thus involuntary, but found it admissible
under what's called the St. Lawrence rule. That rule, taken from
an old case of the same name, held that even involuntary statements
are admissible if they are reliable -- if, in other words, the
suspect is proved to have been telling the truth. In this way,
those who make false confessions are still protected.
As Judge HUMPHREY wrote with considerable understatement of the
purported inducement, "There was no aura of oppression, no torture
it was almost a gentlemen's agreement, if you will."
Mr. SWEENEY was duly convicted by a judge and jury of robbery,
assault while using a weapon and two other weapons offences, and sentenced to six years in prison.
Fast forward to the Ontario Court of Appeal, where Mr.
SWEENEY's
new lawyer, Howard
BORENSTEIN, successfully argued that his client's
Charter right to remain silent had been violated by the police
having held over his head the "threat" of the raucous search.
In a September 25, 2000, decision, Mr. Justice Marc
ROSENBERG,
writing for the unanimous court, threw out the involuntary confession,
thundered that "a threat to destroy the property of a family
member by abusing the authority given to the police by the search
warrant is not properly characterized as a technical threat"
and said that if the confession were allowed, "it would be condoning
the use of threats to abuse judicial process" and would "raise serious concerns for the administration of justice."
More broadly, Judge
ROSENBERG said that the old St. Lawrence
rule was now so undermined by the Charter that it "would only
be in highly exceptional circumstances" that a trial judge would
be entitled to admit a confession like Mr.
SWEENEY's.
And because the poor cab driver -- remember him? -- had had only
a glimpse of his attacker, and there was virtually no other evidence
against Mr.
SWEENEY, the Court of Appeal set aside the conviction and entered an acquittal.
Mr. SWEENEY went on to compile his lengthy criminal record, allegedly
witness a double murder about which he remained mute, and die
on the floor of the G-Spot. I wonder what all that does for the glory of the administration of justice.
Clarification Due to my inability to read my own notes, I wrote
the other day that Adrian
BAPTISTE, gunned down last Saturday
in a North York parking lot and only eight days out of jail after
being acquitted of second-degree murder, had been talking of
straightening out his life, and thinking of going into law enforcement.
In fact, as his lawyer David
BAYLISS told me, Mr.
BAPTISTE had dreamed of becoming a lawyer.
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SWEET o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2003-05-12 published
Melba Rosamond
SWEET
By Jean BISHOP
Monday,
May 12, 2003 - Page A16
Pioneer, farmer, daughter, sister, aunt, friend. Born December
20, 1900, in Malahide Township, Ontario Died January 17, in St.
Thomas, Ontario, of natural causes, aged 102.
Melba SWEET, youngest child of John and Rosamond McKenney
SWEET,
was deeply rooted in pioneer tradition.
Beginning in 1842, her grandfather cleared the land and built
all the buildings on what came to be her farm, just one road
north of Aylmer, Ontario In addition, a tragic event in the
McKENNEY
family had a great influence on Melba's life. In November, 1869,
diphtheria struck. In five weeks time, six of the youngest of
the 11 McKENNEY children died as a result. Three years later,
a little girl named Rosamond was born. She was Melba's mother.
Parents, and siblings ranging in age from 12 to 20, lavished
love on this baby and vied with each other to teach her pioneer
skills.
Rosamond's three children, Gene, Maud and Melba, thrived in the
atmosphere she created with her sunny disposition, great sense
of humour and mastery of all sorts of skills from breaking and
riding horses to gardening or making hairpin lace.
Melba was a true pioneer, herself. She was in her thirties before
electricity came to the farm. That meant cooking and heating
with wood, no refrigeration or electric washing machine, milking
cows by hand, no indoor bathroom. In those days, if you needed
something, you made it yourself. And there wasn't much that was
beyond Rosamond's skills -- and that she didn't teach to Melba.
Practically all meat, fruits and vegetables were grown and preserved
on the farm. Melba's father used to say, "You won't find any
tin cans on this place." Clothes for both women and men were
sewn at home; soap was made from wood ashes and lye. This meant
working long hours. All her life Melba felt she should rise at
4: 30 a.m. to get everything done.
From an early age she took over food preparation. Cooking on
a wood-burning range she produced incredible meals for her family
and for parties with Friends. Food was always plentiful and delicious.
Melba fondly remembered those years when her sister, Maud, after
a few years of teaching and working as a bookkeeper in Detroit,
came home to stay. They expanded their mother's gardens, adding
extensive plots of spring bulbs along the road and a 50-foot
long row of delphiniums for bouquets to decorate the church.
In the winters, Melba and Maud worked on handicrafts with Rosamond,
making beautiful quilts and hooked rugs, handmade lingerie and
pillow cases with crocheted lace borders and inserts. The years
passed so happily that Melba declined several offers of marriage
to stay on at home.
Melba and Maud took tender care of their father and mother, who
lived to celebrate their 72nd wedding anniversary. Their father
lived to the age of 96 and Rosamond, who was born in that house,
lived there all her 98 years.
After Maud's death from a heart attack 34 years ago, Melba took
over the farm books and work on the grounds. Into her 90s, she
mowed two acres of lawn, kept two large freezers filled with
food for herself and her farming partner, who worked the dairy
farm on shares. She also did seasonal jobs, such as cleaning
out eavestroughs or going out an upstairs window onto the kitchen
roof to put on storm windows.
Determined to live life in her own way, Melba managed to stay
in her home with the help of good Friends and homecare workers
until a fall put her in hospital in May, 2002. Friends and family
and caregivers cherished the special individual she remained
until the end.
Jean BISHOP is Melba's niece.
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SWERDLOW o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2003-04-11 published
Visionary performer waged war on trivial art
Her trademark was a experimental process that embraced dance,
music, text, mime, clown, ritual and mask
By Paula CITRON
Friday,
April 11, 2003 - Page R13
Canada has lost a powerful force in experimental theatre and
dance. Director, dancer, actor, writer and choreographer Elizabeth
SZATHMARY died last month in Toronto.
While she will be remembered as a dynamic figure, her artistic
life will remain a contradiction. At the beginning of her career,
Ms. SZATHMARY was one of the gilded darlings of Toronto's burgeoning
experimental theatre. At the end, she was seen by some as a marginalized,
religious eccentric who put on plays in church basements.
To her long-time Friends and loyalists, however, Ms.
SZATHMARY's
life was a spiritual journey in which art, religion and morality
were inextricably intertwined in a nobility of purpose.
Ms. SZATHMARY was born in New York on October 12, 1937, to Jewish-Hungarian
parents. Her mother was an unhappy former opera singer and vaudeville
performer and her father was a composer and arranger who wrote
the theme for the popular television show Get Smart and who abandoned
his family. Ms.
SZATHMARY attended New York's High School of
Performing Arts and later performed with the Metropolitan Opera
Ballet under choreographer Antony
TUDOR.
A ravishing beauty with masses of long, jet-black curls and compelling
light-coloured eyes, Ms.
SZATHMARY attracted followers throughout
her career. She was, says Toronto choreographer David
EARLE,
a powerful, mysterious presence and a charismatic performer.
Another admirer was Canadian Robert
SWERDLOW.
Mr.
TUDOR's piano
accompanist, he fell in love with the beautiful young dancer
and followed her to France where Ms.
SZATHMARY danced with such
companies as Les Ballets Classique de Monte Carlo and Les Ballets
Contemporains de Paris. He was the first of many artists to be
inspired by Ms.
SZATHMARY.
"Elizabeth was a theatre philosopher who wanted to save the world
through the beauty and truth of her art," Mr.
SWERDLOW said.
The couple relocated to Montreal in the mid-sixties where Mr.
SWERDLOW got a job with the National Film Board. One assignment
brought him to Toronto, and it was Ms.
SZATHMARY who persuaded
him to settle there because of the city's "happening" dance scene.
Performing under the name Elizabeth
SWERDLOW, she first worked
with Mr. EARLE and the future co-founders of Toronto Dance Theatre.
In 1969, Mr.
SWERDLOW took an unexpected windfall of $30,000
and built his wife a performing venue of her own. In this way,
Global Village Theatre emerged from a former Royal Canadian Mounted
Police stable and the couple went on to became synonymous with
a new wave of provocative, political, issue-oriented theatre.
Mr. SWERDLOW provided the words and music, and co-wrote the shows
Elizabeth co-wrote, choreographed, directed and was the featured
performer. Importantly, she was the visionary who came up with
original concepts and her trademark, multidisciplinary theatrical
process embraced dance, music, text, mime, clown, ritual and
mask.
Among their better-known collaborations was Blue.S.A., an indictment
of the "American empire," and Justine, the story of a young
girl who gains wisdom through the vicissitudes of life. A huge
hit, Justine went to New York where it won off-Broadway awards
and enjoyed a long run.
Its success meant Global Village became a stopping place for
others. Gilda
RADNER,
John
CANDY and Salome
BEY represented just
some of the talent that passed through. Later, when Ms.
SZATHMARY
founded Inner Stage Theatre, she helped propel the early careers
of Antoni CIMOLINO and Donald
CARRIER of the Stratford Festival,
Jeannette ZINGG and Marshall
PYNKOSKI of Opera Atelier and Native
American performer Raoul
TRUJILLO.
In the mid-seventies, Ms.
SZATHMARY experienced a religious conversion
and became a devout Christian.
For Mr. SWERDLOW, it was the last straw in an already turbulent
relationship. After the couple split up, Ms.
SZATHMARY founded
Inner Stage, a name that expressed her desire to produce art
that would transform and heal through spirituality. To better
strike out on her own, she also shed the
SWERDLOW name. Until
the 1990s, the main work of Inner Stage was a series of acclaimed
morality tales -- or modern fables as Ms.
SZATHMARY called them
which toured schools from coast to coast. She also explored
the storytelling power of Native American myths and turned to
such themes as the plight of street youth or to the Holocaust
from a teenager's point of view. Her final project, No Fixed
Address, attempted to air the true voice of the homeless by both
telling their stories and casting them as actors.
By all accounts, Ms.
SZATHMARY was a true eccentric who personalized
everything. Her computer, for example, was called Daisy. Her
home was a living museum dominated by a family of cats who occupied
their own stools at the dining table, held conversations and
sent out Christmas cards to the pets of Friends. Spiritual sayings,
religious art and theatre memorabilia covered every scrap of
wall and floor space. On an even more personal level, Ms.
SZATHMARY
kept a journal of religious visions and dreams written in ornate
calligraphy and illustrated in Hungarian folk-style art. What
is more, she described ecstatic events and augurisms, including
a personal affinity with bison, as if such occurrences were as
routine as the weather.
In her work, Ms.
SZATHMARY demanded perfection, which meant she
often proved impossible to work alongside. Friends and colleagues
Robert MASON,
Julia
AMES and Peter
GUGELER all talk about Ms.
SZATHMARY's middle-of-the-night phone calls -- and the fact that
she brooked no criticism or contrary opinions. All the same,
their devotion never lessened.
"She was a queen and we were her subjects," said Mr.
GUGELER.
"Elizabeth never left you once she got ahold of you."
Guerrilla theatre, grass-roots theatre, shoe-string theatre,
theatre against all odds, a "let's-make-a-show" mentality --
that was the brave, artistic world in which Ms.
SZATHMARY waged
her war against what she saw as frivolous or commercial art.
In 1989, Inner Stage lost its operating grant and from that time
on she financed her own productions. During the last year that
she was able to work, she earned a pitiful $5,000.
Ms. SZATHMARY continued to perform in all her productions, turning
more to straight acting as her dancing powers declined. Even
so, she never gave up the stage to anyone.
Elizabeth SZATHMARY died of rectal cancer in Toronto on March
28. A memorial service will be held at the Church of the Redeemer,
162 Bloor St. W., Toronto, at 3 p.m. on April 27.
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