McFRINN o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2007-06-11 published
Shots only came one way, police say
By Colin FREEZE,
Page A1
Toronto -- Hope has a habit of dying in Jamestown.
Joan BAKER, a mother of three, heard about six staccato bursts
echo up the road from her housing project on a beautiful Saturday
afternoon. "Oh, maybe it's firecrackers," is what she recalls
hoping.
Then she saw a shiny silver Mercedes sport utility vehicle speed
around a bend on John Garland Boulevard, followed by what looked
to be a blue Honda. Before long, she saw the Honda, stopped just
around the corner, with all of its doors open and the passengers
having fled, all except a young man who lay dying on the grass
- the unarmed victim, police say, of a drive-by attack.
Paramedics arrived and put a tarp over the man. It was at that
point that Ms.
BAKER held out another hope, that maybe the victim
was not one of her neighbours. "Oh jeez, that person is dead,"
she recalled thinking, while looking at the body. "You want to
bet they're going to blame it on Jamestown?"
But then she saw a distraught mother of four from across the
walkway. "She was just begging for someone to tell her, 'no it
was not him,' Ms.
BAKER recalled. She told her neighbour she
had gotten a glimpse of the victim, and that it was a young white
man, wearing a white do-rag and white sneakers.
The other woman burst out in hysterical crying. Hope that her
teenaged son was alive had just evaporated. It was his body that
was lying under that tarp; he had gotten to within a few metres
of his home after fleeing an attack.
Toronto
Police yesterday identified Jose Hierro
SAEZ, 19, as
Toronto's latest homicide victim. The shooting seriously injured
three of his Friends - Paddy
McFRINN, 18, Moustaffa
OMAR, 20,
Matthew DALE, 18.
Homicide detectives said the victims were too "groggy" to say
much about the shooters, leaving police few leads yesterday.
"We have some possibilities, but even those are perhaps a stretch,"
Detective
Sergeant
Gary
GRINTON said yesterday.
The detective said that most of the shooting victims held down
jobs and that he has no information to indicate they are gang
members. Most lived in the neighbourhood.
The shooting has been reported as a "gun battle," but detectives
said yesterday that it was one-sided. "It wasn't a battle, that's
the best information we have right now," Det.
GRINTON said. Police
believe the shots were fired from the silver Mercedes sport utility
vehicle, just east of the housing project near Kipling Avenue,
before the two cars got to the housing project.
"It's tremendously frustrating when these things happen because
we work hard in these neighbourhoods and we work hard in Jamestown,"
Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair said at a news conference to
announce the infusion of $5-million from the province to combat
crime in the downtown nightclub district. "It's tremendously
frustrating when a few, frankly, idiots go out and engage in
such wanton violence."
He held out hope that people wouldn't lose faith in police efforts
to curb the violence. During 2005, more than 10 fatal shootings
occurred in the Jamestown housing complex. Since last year, after
Chief Blair announced that his force had "surgically removed"
the leadership of the Jamestown Crew while arresting scores of
alleged gangsters, homicides and shootings have been rare.
Still, the housing project has yet to blot out all the Crips
gang graffiti on its walls, and its residents generally had little
to say to reporters yesterday. "Yeah, that's what happened. That
was my friend," said one young man, before walking off with a
shrug. A few people laid wreaths at the crime scene, but wouldn't
comment.
Twenty-four hours after the shooting, Joan
BAKER sat outside
watching her daughter do her homework, and warning another group
of children playing soccer not to veer into the road where the
cars had sped by the previous day. Many of her neighbours, she
said, "think if you talk to the police or anybody, you're snitching."
Many people in the housing project mind their own business. Still,
the BAKER family knew the shooting victim, not well, but they
liked what they knew about him.
Every morning in the winter when Ms.
BAKER walked her children
out to the bus - she said she sends her children to schools farther
away because of the "peer pressure" in local ones - they would
see the young man warming up the car for his mother. He would
say "Hi Mummy" and smile and sometimes tell jokes.
Ms. BAKER's daughter cried when she learned that their neighbour
was dead. It was a grim reminder for the family of a homicide
two years ago. In that incident, a man who had visited the
BAKERs'
house just before going a party up the street was shot in the
leg when the other man was killed.
The family has been living in the project for seven years, and
it's an uphill struggle at times. Still, "if I can survive Kingston 11,"
Ms. BAKER said, referring to her old neighbourhood in Jamaica,
"I can survive Jamestown."
She hopes to move out of it one day, but "every time I think
I can afford to leave, I just come back down to zero again."
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