THE GUNFIRE ON OUR STREETS
THERE WERE 16 SHOOTING INCIDENTS IN HAMILTON in 2015 — including a fatal home invasion this week in Ancaster. Some shootings involved multiple victims. Some involved multiple gunmen shooting it out in broad daylight on our streets. SPECTATOR REPORTER BILL
IT WAS A BRIGHT AND SUNNY DAY IN mid-May when the bullets began flying on Main Street.
The blond, of course, had no idea what was about to happen. Neither did her ginger-bearded buddy as they strolled past the St. Patrick’s schoolyard heading west, away from the two young men trying desperately to kill each other.
On May 17, at 6:14 p.m., the day’s heat — such as it was — was fading in concert with the lengthening shadows.
In a dashcam videofrom a passing car, the blond can be seen walking, her left hand animated as she chats with her long and lanky friend. She’s in black and white. He’s all in black, hands loose in his pockets as he walks.
That video — just 25 seconds long — was released by police shortly after the shooting.
It offers a rare and horrifying glimpse of the public gunfire that has exploded on city streets and inside our homes at least 16 times this year, killing four men and injuring nine more.
The horror springs from the ordinariness of the scene: A gaggle of cars drifts east down Main Street, pedestrians stroll on the sidewalk — an early evening streetscape, like a hundred others you’ve seen in this city. But for that blissfully unaware couple, as for dozens of other Hamiltonians this year, their fate lay in the cold hands of chance and physics. Death was flying blindly by at about 341 metres per second.
In the video, the transformation from quotidian to kill zone happens more slowly.
AS THE CAR moves east on Main, the first hint we get is a young man in a bill-backwards baseball cap, and oddly, he too is backwards. He’s facing east, but walking west — his feet cutting high short steps as he struggles to pick up speed, without losing his balance, without turning his back on … on what?
Then there, on the cutaway corner of East Avenue, stands an e-bike drawn up on the sidewalk — and jarringly, a black helmet lying abandoned on the ground. Where’s the rider?
But you have no time to consider this, for the car is turning left onto East Avenue. And just before it does you see — 20 metres down Main — a man, we’ll call him Whitepants, leap into the curb lane and dart suddenly back.
And then you realize there’s another man, in the foreground. Bluecap (that’s what he’s wearing) is matching Whitepants’ moves, juking right, then left, like the two of them are locked in some dancing duel. Then the dance turns. Bluecap’s arm shoots up and, just before the car’s turn swings him out of view, you hear a BOOM! and see a quick cloud of cordite spring from his hand. Gun. And he dances back, taking shelter behind a tall grey utility box sunk into the sidewalk.
And now he’s gone, wiped from the frame by the inexorable movement of the car’s turn. Was that really a gun?
But now, two more young men come into view — first Whitehoody who’s just finishing crossing East Avenue and is glancing back at the crack of gunfire and beginning to pick up his pace. On the other side is a much beefier man, Greyhoody, lumbering north on East Avenue, not glancing back, just making tracks.
And then another BOOM and an answering, fainter, CRACK! from another gun.
Surprisingly — we’ve just heard three gunshots — he or she turns off East Avenue and into a driveway leading to a loading dock. As the car stops, Whitehoody, his face a shadowed shape, lopes by framed nicely by the windscreen. You notice, almost idly, how very thin his ankle is. And then the video ends. But not the gunfire. Although they have sought the public’s help, appealing for witnesses to come forward, Hamilton police have released few details of that mayhem, and fewer details of their investigation.
But from witness accounts and photos of windows and walls and cars struck by bullets that evening, it’s clear that many, many more shots were fired than the three heard on the video.
In addition to those shots (which were fired on trajectories roughly parallel with Main Street), the bullet holes found in buildings on both the north and south side of Main, tell another story. It’s clear there was another exchange of gunfire, with the combatants likely on either side of the street, shooting at each other through the gaps in the Sunday Main Street traffic.
One shot punched through the plate glass of a dental surgery on the south side of the street.
Two other shots smashed into the Marz Paints store on the north side, both shots oddly low, one blasting a fist-sized hole in the glass, about 50 centimetres off the ground, the other embedding itself into the outer wall of the now defunct business. Did this fusillade occur before the video? After? But there’s more.
EVIDENCE
OF YET another exchange of gunfire is found in the rear windows of a sedan parked around the corner on East Avenue, in the paint store’s parking lot just 15 metres north of Main Street.
In the video it appears whole, untouched. But in photos taken after the guns are gone, you can see it’s been hit. A bullet tore through the passenger (south) side rear window and then blew out the rear window on the other side, strongly suggesting someone was shooting north up East Avenue from the area where Bluecap was last seen in the video.
The blond and the redhead, 110 metres from Whitepants when he fired in their direction, likely saw none of this deadly duel. At that range, a 9 mm bullet might take a little less than one third of a second to go from gun to girl. The concussive crack of the bullet exploding out of the short barrel would have arrived at her ears almost simultaneously with the bullet itself.
If the bullet missed them both — and, spoiler alert, it did — it could theoretically travel anywhere from 10 to 20 times that distance before finally losing it’s momentum and dropping out of the air at, say, Locke Street.
There were many bullets flying that May day on Main Street, and somehow, miraculously, they all failed to find flesh, instead shattering windows and plaster and smashing into concrete and steel.
“It was kind of a Wild West scenario,” neighbour Mike Peters said at the time.
“It’s not like it was four in the morning, right? My kids, my parents were walking right by there before (the shooting).” Peters, who lives in the area, found a bullet hole in his black Cadillac. The time is an ironic coincidence. Because, not long before four o’clock that very same morning, a mere 380 metres away as the bullet flies, another shootout took place with as many as five shots bursting from a gas station lot at the corner of Ashley and King Streets.
One of those five bullets smashed through the side window of the Homestead Bar, ricocheted off the wall and dug itself into a dark corner of the room where it was found by police the next morning.
“My night-time staff member — she was in the back filling up the mop bucket — could have been hit. That corner is where she usually starts her cleaning. Thank God she was in the kitchen when it happened,” Homestead manager Elizabeth Scott recalled recently.
“She was scared, very scared, she was crying and shaken.”
Scott says nothing really happened earlier that night, although she has kicked youths as young as 14 out of her bar for being under-aged and had them threaten to go get a gun and come back and settle the score.
SETTLING THE SCORE seems to capture the likely motivation in several of this year’s shootings — and also in a 2014 triple shooting that occurred just down the street outside Sheila’s Place restaurant at King Street East and East Avenue North.
That incident began with a fight inside the bar and ended with two youths returning with a gun and opening fire at the crowd. Three people were shot — all survived.
A 17-year-old Toronto youth is in custody and facing numerous weapons charges that are now before the courts. Here in Hamilton. As Elizabeth Scott said, “I’ve been here 11 years and I’ve never seen it like this … I hope police are devoting some quality undercover time on this.”
Police tend not to discuss their undercover operations in public, but Insp. Ryan Diodati, head of investigative services, said the shootings — like all violent incidents — are taken very seriously by police. “But at the same time, we still feel Hamilton is a very safe city.”
Although 10 of the 16 shootings remain unsolved, Diodati said this does not reflect a failure of the police Guns and Gangs squad.
He suggested some suspects may be in custody on other charges, but investigators must be “guided by the evidence (and) we plead with the public to call Crime Stoppers … they may have the one piece we need.”
Diodati said an internal re-organization this year means the police gang unit and their vice and drugs unit are being supervised by the same detective sergeant, resulting in “an enhanced information flow between the two units.”
He doesn’t think this year’s spike in public shootings will become the new normal for Hamilton: “There’s no cause for alarm.” Others felt differently. This summer’s gunplay so alarmed Mayor Fred Eisenberger, he called for a gun ban in the city’s urban area.
He has asked city lawyers to investigate what the city can legally do to curtail gun violence.
There have been several anti-gun rallies, marches and meetings, including a Take Back Barton march in May that Ward 3 Coun. Matthew Green spearheaded
Still, in interviews and public presentations this past year, three different youth workers have said their clients have told them that if they want a gun, they can walk out on the street and get one within one to four hours.
SGT. JON ALSBERGAS used to be the force armourer for the Hamilton Police, but earlier this year he took up the post of youth services co-ordinator.
That means acting as the single point of contact and analysis for the many different programs and services police operate for youth (under 18 years of age) in the city.
Alsbergas knows his service takes guns and gun crime very seriously, but he also doesn’t think there’s any reason to be panicking about Hamilton youth and guns.
“I can tell you right now that, as of Oct. 31, overall youth crime is down 11 per cent compared to the same period last year.
“Youth involvement in violent crime is down 15 per cent … but we must continue to focus on prevention and intervention.”
“We’re not trying to criminalize youth,” Alsbergas explained. “Hopefully, we can act as a positive intervention (in their lives).”
Prevention and intervention are also the focus of another, still brewing, initiative: The mayor’s roundtable on youth strategy.
Eisenberger brought together more than 30 agencies and groups in the wake of the fatal shooting of 18-year-old Shariek Douse in Jamesville in August.
Virtually unanimously, this group of veteran youth workers and principals, shelter workers, police and ethnic community leaders all directed the mayor to first listen to the youth.
So Chris Cutler, the mayor’s adviser on community relations, has spent the past two months meeting, in small informal groups, with more than 200 youth from one end of the city to the other.
He has declined interview requests as he prepares to report back to the mayor’s roundtable, but in November he said he was struck by the passion for the city itself he encountered in those he’d met.
“They want the city to be better,” he recounted. “They don’t want to have to move away.”
That remark calls to mind a 10-year-old boy, witness to one of those bouts of gunfire occurring on our city streets — his street in this case.
The boy, who we’ve agreed not to name because his father fears connecting him publicly to the shooting in any way, was less frightened and more annoyed that two of his young friends had been forced to flee from their front porch because of bullets flying on their street.
What had they been doing on their front porch that he was so reluctant to leave?
Cutting and peeling apples to sell to passersby.