A NEIGHBOURHOOD FALLS SILENT. BLATCHFORD.

HE WENT BACK ONTO THE SIDEWALK, HE WAS ZIGZAGGING, HITTING PEOPLE, BODIES BEING LIFTED.

The place that former Toronto mayor Mel Lastman defiantly brought to life despite a legion of naysayers — a second city downtown in the near suburbs, for God’s sakes — was as quiet as a graveyard.

Late Monday, orange tarpaulins still covered at least five bodies along a two-kilometre stretch of the western side of Yonge Street that is now the scene of a mass murder, at the very least.

Four others had been removed earlier.

Ten people were killed, 15 injured, several critically, as a white rental van deliberately mowed down pedestrians going about their business in the spring sunshine on Toronto’s longest street in the city’s north end.

Eyewitnesses knew perfectly well what they were seeing, and whatever else, whether this was an act of terrorism or something else, they knew it was deliberate.

Henry Yang, who was making a U-turn in his Volvo SUV on Yonge to head southbound, first heard the sounds of the van hitting mailboxes and bus stop signs.

“The moment he hit a fire hydrant, I knew,” Yang said. He began honking his horn, trying to warn people. “Right away, he hit someone,” he said, and “he just kept on going.”

He was about 20 to 30 metres behind the van, and at one point, he said, as traffic grew heavier, the van pulled off the sidewalk and veered into incoming cars heading north.

“He hit a pedestrian who was crossing the road,” Yang said, horror still in his voice. “He flew in the air.”

At this point, Yang had rolled down his window so he could yell at people as well as try to distract the driver.

“He went back onto the sidewalk,” he said. “He was zigzagging, hitting people, bodies being lifted, there was blood bursting from them. It was horrible.”

He said he had no doubt what the driver was doing was intentional.

Neither Toronto Police, the RCMP nor federal Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale had any comment on the alleged motive of the driver, who was arrested quietly and without incident, despite him taking a shooter-style stance, begging police to “shoot me” and threatening that he had a gun in his pocket.

Despite those threats, the man was taken into custody without a whisper of force by a uniformed constable who demonstrated remarkable sangfroid, once even returning to his cruiser to turn off the siren, apparently trying to calm down the man.

He has been identified as 25-year-old Alek Minassian of suburban Richmond Hill, the identification, ironically, made first in the United States.

The arrest was one of about 20,000 events a year where Toronto police deal with what they call E.D. (emotionally disturbed) people without the application of any force.

This new downtown, which turned out to be as vibrant and multicultural and thriving and in-your-face successful as Lastman could ever have dreamed — at its best, the area is a bit like Hong Kong, with its driving 24-7 character, or as 24-7 as is possible in careful Ontario — was unnaturally still.

There was only the wail of fire sirens, chatter on police radios and the sound of choppers circling the enormous crime scene, with vast lengths of yellow tape everywhere, to break the silence.

At Sheppard subway station, police armed to the teeth prowled the closed off intersection. Some even carried submachine guns, a rare sight in Canada.

At Mel Lastman Square, home to what used to be North York City Hall (or Mel’s House), bystanders stared quietly at the three orange tarps on the sidewalk.

Here, with hundreds of people working in the former city hall (it’s still used as a municipal government centre) and the headquarters for the Toronto District School Board right there, was a captive audience ready made for the sort of attack the van unleashed.

People gather here to sit on benches and eat lunch and breathe non-office air. There’s a Starbucks café on one corner, hotdog vendors and food trucks along Yonge Street, a nearby mall with food courts and shops.

The area is a veritable United Nations, without the preening arrogance or flaws of that institution: Every skin colour in the world is here, every garment of every religion, (turbans, burkas, headscarves, dashikis), every sort of food.

There are dozens of gleaming new condominium towers from regular to super luxe lining the Yonge Street corridor; behind them, on the side streets, are townhouses so new they’re practically right out of the box. There are playgrounds, schools, swings, people walking their dogs, parks, daycares.

This is where people came when they couldn’t afford downtown, and that was before downtown got worldclass rich and predominantly white. They built lives in these condo towers. They had kids.

This is where Toronto is at its most diverse and inclusive, its hardest working — really, its most beautiful.

“It doesn’t matter why the guy did it,” said Arias Reisiardekani, as he walked with Henry Yang to a bus police had commandeered to interview witnesses. Reisiardekani lives in a building on Yonge Street and when he was told what was happening, he ran out to help, carrying a pair of latex gloves.

“We won’t let this divide us,” Reisiardekani said with confidence that was almost serene, in the circumstances, but lovely.

“The community will pull together.”