Bullets strike east-end homes on anniversary of gang killing
When bullets struck three homes — two of them with children inside — on Claremont Drive in the east end over the supper hour Wednesday, it marked a grim anniversary.
Exactly two years earlier, a neighbour recalled, she had called 911 and tried to comfort Mohamed Najdi, a dying Crips gang member who had been lured to the deadend street, where he was shot in the back.
“They picked a quiet neighbourhood,” said the woman, who declined to give her name, gesturing to the townhouses off St. Laurent Boulevard near Hemlock Road, where she’s lived for decades.
While there are some “shady” people in the co-op housing complex, she said that if the unit with several bullet wounds in its front window was targeted, it was in error.
The occupant is an elderly woman in a wheelchair who wasn’t at home, she said.
“Speculation is that it was another unit that was the target,” the neighbour said. “Trust me, this lady has nothing to do with gangs.”
Police, who brought in a sniffer dog and are reviewing surveillance footage, don’t have evidence that the shooting was targeted, but are continuing to investigate. No arrests have been made. Police were called to investigate gunshots at about 7:10 p.m. on Wednesday, then discovered that shots had been fired into three residences, two of them occupied by children.
The residents weren’t at home Thursday morning, but a few doors down, Maranda Patterson had just seen her young daughter off to school.
A member of the co-op’s board, she didn’t hear the gunshots, but learned of what happened through texts and calls from neighbours, as she washed her dinner dishes. When she stepped onto her back porch, she saw flashing lights and police officers swarming the “family-oriented” neighbourhood where kids play on the paths and on the nearby sports field into the evening.
Now she’s having to answer her eight-year-old’s questions about the gunfire and reassure her that no one was hurt and the police are looking out for them.
“She was scared,” Patterson said, and asked, “Did someone die, mommy?”
Mohamed Najdi, a 28-year-old known on the street as “Magic,” was gunned down in a Claremont Drive parking lot on Jan. 10, 2016.
When one of seven people charged in his death pleaded guilty to manslaughter last fall, the Crown revealed a planned plot to kidnap the known gang member and drug dealer, who was killed as he tried to escape.
Two doors down from the townhouse with the bullet-riddled window, another unit had a sign on its door with a Bible verse in Spanish.
“Be strong and courageous,” it translates into English. “Do not be frightened and do not be dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.”