Witnesses still struggling one year after van attack
TORONTO — The survivor guilt settled in moments after he saw all the bodies. Later came the fear of walking Yonge Street again.
He grew hyperaware of sounds and people around him, looking for anything out of place. And driving his company’s white van became a struggle.
“For the longest time I was worried about my brakes,” said Dion Fitzgerald.
“If I saw someone crossing at a crosswalk, I would brake like a block away.”
The 43-year-old father of six was one of many Torontonians whose lives were changed forever that sunny afternoon on April 23, 2018.
It was 1:27 p.m. when Fitzgerald signed out of Eva’s Satellite, where he worked with about 30 troubled teens and young adults. He was walking down Yonge Street in north Toronto to get lunch when he saw the first body.
He immediately worried that it was one of the young people he worked with, but as he got closer Fitzgerald realized it was an older man on the ground, one he didn’t recognize.
“He was already gone,” he said. Soon, police arrived at the scene and witnesses described seeing the man get hit by a white Ryder van, which also struck and killed several others.
“I need to check on my 30 young people, to see if they were hurt,” Fitzgerald recalls thinking, as most of them were without parents.
As he continued to search for familiar faces, Fitzgerald came across body after body — some of them dead, some of them grievously injured.
“There was a lot of blood. One woman’s legs were mangled. I had never seen flesh torn apart like that,” he said in a recent interview, choking up.
“At this point for me, I’m really seeing a lot of death, a lot of people who were going about their day and unnecessarily died or were injured.”
As Fitzgerald would later hear on the news, 10 people had been killed in the van attack, and 16 others wounded. Alek Minassian, now 26, was charged in the attack and faces a lengthy murder trial that is scheduled for next year.