Two sisters wounded in playground shooting
Brazen daytime shooting hits girls in playground
SCARBOROUGH, ONT. • The scene was instantly horrific, according to eyewitnesses. One moment a dozen children were playing after school on a jungle gym with yellow slides, a suburban Toronto playground where kids frequently sell fruit or lemonade in summer.
The next moment there was a spray of gunshots from the nearby parking lot that tore through the thin wooden fence. One child was grazed near the shoulder but the injury was so minor it was treated on the scene.
“Some cowards came into this neighbourhood and opened fire into a playground,” Toronto Police Chief Mark Saunders said at the scene hours after the shooting Thursday. He and the mayor vowed that justice would find the shooter.
Two sisters took the worst of it. The older, aged nine, was hit in the ankle.
“They f—in’ shot me,” she said, and she started trying to drag herself home, just across the road.
“Literally trying to tuck and roll,” Sasha Hibbert, a young mother who spoke of people feeling confused that anyone could be so reckless with gunfire, especially in a predominantly immigrant neighbourhood where people share an appreciation for the struggle and fragility of life.
The girl’s younger sister, just five years old, was more grievously injured. She was wearing a white shirt, and when Clayton Hunte was the first to reach her, it was already staining red with blood. Hit in the abdomen, she began vomiting blood and bile.
The girls’ mother, identified by neighbours as Stacey King, came outside from her home across the street in response to the commotion, and it was clear she did not immediately register what had happened. The younger child was lying on the ground outside the property manager’s office. She said she was cold and tired, and Hunte said he told her not to fall asleep as he squeezed at pressure points to rouse her, but already her eyes were rolling back in her head.
The first police officer to arrive held paper towel against her wound until an ambulance arrived. She has reportedly undergone surgery and is expected to recover, as is her sister.
In an interview in their home, Hunte said he and Hibbert were getting ready to take their son for a walk at around 5 p.m. when they heard the shots, in a series of rapid bursts, which prompted them to go outside and look. A few minutes previously, they had noticed about seven men hanging around smoking marijuana in the parking lot.
“The last two (shots), that’s when you hear the girls screaming,” Hunte said.
Hunte described security video footage of the Scarborough playground that he watched with the property manager and a police officer after the girls were taken to hospital. It shows two men in the playground. One does not interact with the children, but the other appears engaged in horseplay, as if he knew them, Hunte said. At 4:58 p.m., they leave the frame and appear to jump over the low wooden fence toward the parking lot.
“Forty-nine seconds later you see the kids scatter,” he said. Some fell and did not get up for minutes, as if frozen in fear.
Hunte said the footage shows the younger girl being hit in the abdomen. She falls, gets back up, and falls again after two or three steps, lying in front of the property management building where Hunte found her a few seconds later.
Several residents described hearing six or seven shots. One described them coming in bursts of two or three. But the wooden fence shows nine bullet holes, over a wide area of about two metres across, some of them clustered.
They indicate the shots came from the parking lot that is separated from the playground by a low wooden fence and a pathway. They followed a downward trajectory, as the parking lot is higher. Looking through them, it is clear they are lined up straight at the side of the playground.
Orlando Paul, who lives a few doors from the playground, said he was on his balcony and heard a car immediately leave the lot at a high rate of speed right after the shots.
Police have said they are looking for a black four-door Nissan Versa sedan, from the years 2007-11, pictures of which they released Friday. No suspects have been identified. They said a man fired at another man who was in the park.
Both girls went to the nearby The Divine Infant Catholic School, and had recently lost a peer who died last month after a seizure. The school board put out a statement saying it “is on public record in support of legislation to curb gun violence in the city, and indeed across the country.” It also said “supports are in place for staff and students at the school as they try to process what has happened. These supports will remain in place as long as needed."
Stacey King, the girls’ mother, could not be contacted and was thought to be with her children in the Hospital for Sick Children.
Recently filed records from the Office of the Superintendent of Bankruptcy indicate she is 42 years old and has run a jewelry business.
Monique Evans said she babysat the two girls, and that the community is trying to protect and care for them in such a vulnerable time.