As Danforth mourns, those who saw van attack send comfort
Patrick Savoy was at a recent open-air concert. He took a moment to note the exits. On April 23, a white van barrelled down the Yonge St. sidewalk. Savoy performed first aid on a dying woman. He was a witness to the worst mass killing in Toronto history, and says he will never forget the carnage he saw that day.
But he didn’t let that memory hold him back, or stop him from enjoying the music.
“You have to keep living your life as is,” Savoy said.
That’s his message to the people who were going about their daily lives when gunfire rained down on the Danforth Sunday night, killing 10-year-old Julianna Kozis of Markham and 18-year- old Reese Fallon and injuring 13 others.
“Be aware of what’s going on, be aware of your surroundings, but still live your life,” he told the Star on Wednesday. “It’s an anomaly and we live in Toronto and people are there to support you.”
The survivors, witnesses and shaken local business owners who were touched by the Yonge St. van attack have moved past the candlelit vigils and memorials overflowing with flowers. Three months later, they’re healing and reflecting on what they’ve learned — and how that could now help the Danforth community.
Savoy came to the aid of Dorothy Sewell that day, an 80year-old grandma with a sunny demeanour. After she was struck, Savoy took her pulse, checked to see if she was conscious and performed CPR. She was one of the 10 killed. Savoy said he got in touch with her family and went to her funeral.
“I went through the process of shock and grief, and then the funeral was closure,” he said.
Savoy said it is “tough” to remember what he saw after the rampage.
“Those visuals will never, ever, ever leave your mind,” he said. “You have to accept that those are images that you saw, you’re going to remember them and it’s going to affect you some days, and some days it won’t.”
Michael Smith’s mother, Beverly, lost both her legs in the van attack. After the Danforth shooting, “it honestly all just came crashing back,” he said
“It stays with me every single day. I still think about it. The biggest thing that’s come out of this is how close I am with my family, how much support the community has given us.”
In the immediate aftermath on the violence on the Danforth, Smith said the focus should be purely on recovery.
“I blocked out everything, and it was my mum and that was it,” he said. “In hindsight, that’s all it should ever be, is just focus on your family and focus on the people you care about.
At Willowdale Baptist Church, that’s something senior pastor Bruce Jones said the community is already doing.
In the days after the van attack, the church opened its doors to offer “coffee, rest place, restrooms, prayer, water,” with a small handwritten sign to mourners at Olive Square.
The event brought the community closer, Jones said, with people being more willing to catch each other’s eyes and smile. “The best advice I think I could give any community that is grieving is look up and have your eyes open,” he said.
They’ve had to look out for each other, as tragedies can “trigger other pain.”
“We don’t want to forget these kinds of tragedies but we also don’t want to wallow in the emotions of them,” he said.
Willowdale has also struggled, he said, with how to permanently memorialize the space at Olive Square, a question residents and businesses owners at the Danforth will also have to consider.
On Wednesday afternoon at Olive Square, where a mountain of flowers and stuffed animals once marked the spot across from where the attack began, only a few messages of support scrawled in black marker on stone remain.
“We don’t want to forget these kinds of tragedies but we also don’t want to wallow in the emotions of them,” Jones said.
Many of the flowers at Olive Square and the nearby Mel Lastman Square came from Secret Garden Floral & Gift Boutique. Owners Summer Lin and Katherine Liu put out free bouquets on the curb after the van attack. Lin, who spoke to the Star through a colleague who translated from Mandarin, said that offering the flowers was a way for them to feel like they were doing something, and helped ease the sad days following the attack.
She said Willowdale came together as a community, and she urged the people of the Danforth to do the same. Her message to them? “It will pass,” she said. “I know it’s sad but it will go away. But we will never forget people who were injured and died.”
Victim Services Toronto provides a 24/7 hotline providing support and information for victims. It can be reached at 416-808-7066.