‘WE’RE STRONG ... RESILIENT’
Toronto mourns attack victims
Afew years ago, when the officer kept showing up for various charity events, Peter Yuen asked himself, “Who the hell is Kenny Lam?”
The world knows now what Toronto Deputy Police Chief Yuen found out: Lam is the 42-year-old Toronto Police constable whose remarkable composure in peacefully arresting the alleged mass killer Alek Minassian Monday has police, security officials and citizens shaking their heads in admiration.
Ten people ranging in age from their mid-20s to 80s died in the carnage as a rented white van, allegedly driven by Minassian, zigzagged onto the busy sidewalks along the west side of Yonge Street.
“It’s beyond ‘Serve and Protect’,” Yuen, citing the force motto, said Tuesday in a phone interview. “It’s beyond that. It’s more than that.”
As evidence, he said, Tuesday morning — after a predictably sleepless night, thoughts racing through his mind — Lam made sure to call in for his 6 a.m. roll call at 32 Division in the city’s north end.
“He wanted to thank the other officers, his uniform platoon.”
Lam, Yuen said, was the first officer on the scene at Poyntz Avenue, south of Sheppard Avenue West and Yonge Street. It was his good luck and his bad luck.
“Kenny was on day shift, patrolling Yonge Street. This (the alert about a van that had been mowing down pedestrians) was broadcast … We (police, fire and paramedics) run towards trouble and he responded to the area.
“There’s no magic formula; he ran to the vehicle.”
As he arrived, about seven minutes after the first call for help, the suspect was out of the white cargo van, and as Lam, firearm out, began shouting commands, the man assumed a shooter’s stance.
In fact, he assumed it several times, each time as if pulling something from his pocket. He, too, had something in his hands.
“Get down!” Lam shouted, but stopped quickly to turn off the siren on his cruiser, a classic “deescalation” technique meant to calm an agitated suspect.
The man told him “I have a gun in my pocket” and asked him to “Kill me” or “Shoot me in the head,” but Lam quickly figured out that he likely didn’t have a gun, and that whatever he was holding in his hand, it wasn’t a gun.
He put away his own firearm, got out his baton, and kept approaching, and the man surrendered.
Moments later, as Global TV captured, one of several astonished bystanders approached Lam to say he’d done a great job and shake his hand.
Lam shook it, then said, cool as a cucumber, “Guys, let’s just clear the road, OK?”
He was less phlegmatic Tuesday. “He’s a mess,” Yuen said, after meeting him. “Roller coaster, up and down, doubting himself, doesn’t want the spotlight.
“It was life and death for him yesterday.
“This will remain with him.”
Yuen knows. In 1990, as an undercover officer, he was doing a play at an underground gaming house.
“The place got robbed,” he said, “and to make a long story shot, they found out I was a cop.”
The deputy chief is cut from the same modest cloth as Lam.
What he didn’t want to say, and ridiculously abridged when pressed, was that the robbers found out by ordering the gamblers to toss their wallets in a pile on the floor. Spotting a police badge, they promptly threatened to shoot a person every minute unless the cop identified himself.
Yuen had the stones to immediately stand up and do that. For his trouble, one of the robbers put a handgun to his head, and then in his mouth; he pulled the trigger, but the gun jammed. What saved his life, Yuen said, was that other officers arrived and the robbers knew they were surrounded.
It was almost 30 years ago, but Yuen said every time he drives by Finch Avenue East and Midland Avenue, where the gambling den was, he thinks, “This is the place I almost lost my life.
“Any time I hear an officer in distress, I feel it,” he said. “I don’t wish it upon anyone.”
Back then, there was virtually none of what is now called “after care” for officers involved in profoundly traumatic events. Yuen drove himself home that night.
“The culture was different,” he said. He had only himself, and considers himself lucky to “get through it and progress in my career.”
Toronto, he said, now has the best such care in the country for its officers.
The two men have more in common: Lam was born in Toronto, Yuen in Hong Kong, but both have immigrant Chinese parents who left everything they knew to come to Canada to give their children a brighter future.
“His father still runs a restaurant,” Yuen said, “Just like my father.”
Lam went to university and graduated as an engineer. He was working for Bell Canada when, eight years ago, he decided he wanted more. That his father had been an auxiliary police officer in Hong Kong helped. Yuen calls it his defining moment, thinking, “What I’m doing is not enough. He asks himself, ‘How can I help people more?’ ”
Yuen dropped out of university after two years, but he said, “My calling was the same.” He was watching the Chinese community — and other diverse communities in Toronto — grow, and he thought to himself, “it wouldn’t be bad to be a part of it. I just wanted to be a good police officer.”
Lam is happily married, Yuen said, to his high school sweetheart. They have no children, but Yuen said Lam is the first officer out of the gate to help a colleague whose child is ill. He does special engravings on coins; he’s a fixture at Cops for Cancer events. “That’s how I got to know him,” Yuen said.
Way back, when Peter Yuen stood up in front of armed robbers and identified himself as a cop to save the lives of others, he was named Toronto’s police officer of the year.
“Yeah,” he said with a laugh, “I should have been victim of the year.”
That honour isn’t enough for Kenny Lam. As a command officer, Yuen said he’s incredibly proud of him. His conduct in that life and death moment “speaks to his life experience. He’s mature, he’s able to assess, he was able to process his training.”
Yuen was one of about five Chinese Canadian officers in those days. Now, there are more than 100 and “I see them all flourishing.” He loves the diversity of the modern force.
“Send us your best and your brightest,” he said. “This is a worthwhile career.”