‘I never wanted to kill anyone’
Acomposed James Forcillo answered four quick questions from his lawyer about his killing of Sammy Yatim: Did he shoot and kill the teenager on July 26-27, 2013; did he ever want to shoot him; why did he fire the first burst of three shots; and why the second burst of six that followed?
The 32-year-old Toronto Police officer respectively answered: “That’s correct; I did”; “Of course not; I never wanted to kill anyone”; “I believed Mr. Yatim was coming off the streetcar to attack me”; and “I believed Mr. Yatim was in the process of getting up to continue to attack me.”
And then, before you could say Jack the Bear, Peter Brauti bought Forcillo, in the language of police, space and distance by abruptly shifting gears and eliciting details of the officer’s compelling personal story.
Forcillo is pleading not guilty to second-degree murder in the death of the 18-year-old on the Dundas West streetcar three summers ago.
Yatim, who had precipitated a stampede from the streetcar when, with his exposed penis in one hand and a switchblade in the other, he swung the knife at a young girl sitting at the rear, was hit by eight of the nine bullets Forcillo fired.
He was the first witness for the defence.
Forcillo, it turns out, was the only child of struggling and unlucky parents. Born in Montreal, the small family moved to Toronto when Forcillo was in Grade 8 and just two years later, when he was 14, his mother was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer, and the little family fell apart.
“My father couldn’t cope,” Forcillo told Ontario Superior Court Judge Ed Then and a jury Wednesday. “He didn’t have the coping skills; he started to break down.”
The father, who was in textiles, then moved to Los Angeles for work and Forcillo and his mother remained in Toronto, where he became her de facto caregiver as well as the chief cook and bottle-washer.
When he graduated from high school, he joined the Canadian reserves as a military policeman.
He’d wanted to be a police officer since he was about 12, Forcillo said, wanting to help people and solve “the puzzle,” as he put it, but also driven by his hunger for stability. “I didn’t have the most stable home life,” he said, “and we were always broke,” so the policeman’s regular paycheque appealed to him.
The summer he took his army basic training, his mother went out to L.A. to join her husband, but by September of 2000, just three weeks into his “Police Foundations” program at Seneca College, “I got a call from my father. My mother needed more care than he was able to provide,” he said, so he quit the course and moved to California to take care of her.
“She was getting pretty sick,” Forcillo said in his even and matter-of-fact manner. “She needed a lot of attention.”
His mother came back to Toronto the following fall for a final round of chemotherapy. Shortly thereafter, he got a call from the hospital that “she didn’t have much time left,” so he rushed back to her side, and was with her when she died on Oct. 21, 2001.
He returned to Los Angeles then to be with his dad, but “he just shut down … he was laid off again, we lost our status.”
Seeing the writing on the wall, he fast-tracked his “Administration of Justice” course at East L.A. College, finishing two semesters early at the top of the class.
In February of 2003, he was back in Toronto, renting a shared room in a basement apartment of a North York house. It was his lucky break, because the house was owned by the parents of the woman who became his wife, Irina, and that’s how he met her.
The first member of his family to get any sort of postsecondary education, Forcillo was determined to get his degree. He enrolled in law and security at York University, but when he graduated in 2007, it was with a degree in psychology.
“It’s a real winding road,” he said.
He ended up spending almost three years as a court security officer at the Old City Hall courts.
He married in 2007, and finally, two years later, got what’s called a dual offer to join Toronto Police — meaning he could attend either of spring or fall sessions at the Ontario Police College (OPC). With Irina pregnant with the first of their two little girls, he opted for the later session. He finished 12th of 137 cadets bound for the Toronto force.
At this point, Brauti switched gears again, and moved to the sort of training Forcillo received at both the OPC and the Toronto Police College, which Forcillo wryly described as “like a finishing school” for officers headed for the streets of the city.
Brauti played two videos, both of which Forcillo saw multiple times in use-offorce training, both bristling with machismo.
One featured role-play scenarios where officers faced people with edged weapons, but the other concentrated on the real-life story of two rookie constables, Clayton Speers and Dave Edgar of the Barrie Police north of Toronto, who in July of 2009 had their throats slashed by a mentally ill man armed with a knife. Both officers lost almost half their blood, but managed to shoot the man dead.
The “take-away” for Forcillo, as Brauti put it, was that “knives are deadly weapons” and that “drawing your firearm is the appropriate response” to someone with a knife.
Forcillo will continue his testimony Thursday.
IT CREATES THE ILLUSION OF ACADEMIC PROGRESS, WHEN IT’S REALLY JUST PUSHING A STUDENT ALONG, INSTEAD OF CHALLENGING AND EDUCATING THEM PROPERLY. — STEWART PHILLIP, UNION OF BRITISH COLUMBIA INDIAN CHIEFS, ON EVERGREEN CERTIFICATES