Victim’s mother sensed ‘something wasn’t right’
Family mystified by shooting death of 29-year-old TSN staffer
Grace Gayle started peeling potatoes.
It was routine for the mother, who raised both her sons — Jonathan and his older brother, Justin — in Richmond Hill before relocating to Oshawa a few years ago, to make dinners for them from scratch.
Jonathan Gayle-West’s drive home on the evening of Dec. 12 should have been routine, too — his mother expected him home by 8 p.m. “I text him and found it strange that he didn’t respond,” Gayle recalled. “I started to get an uneasy feeling ... something wasn’t right.”
She heard nothing for hours. So the meal went incomplete and she went to bed. At about 1 a.m., she said she woke to police at her doorstep. “They said they had reason to believe he was shot,” she said. “I started screaming and hollering.”
By all accounts, Gayle-West had a normal day before he was shot and killed behind the wheel of his Honda Civic while driving on Islington Ave.
As relatives of the killed TSN staffer prepared for his funeral Saturday, his mother and brother lamented that they had no inkling anything had gone awry.
Amplifying his relatives’ bewilderment is the revelation that he was returning from a private prayer session when he was killed. His mother expected him to be home before 8 p.m.
“When he finished the session of prayer, the minister text me to say that your handsome son just left,” she said.
That was shortly before 6 p.m., she estimates.
“He was a man of faith,” she said. “The Sunday before his death, he went to church.”
The surreal experience has left a gaping hole filled with unanswered questions.
Gayle had no suspicion of anything amiss that would have triggered the egregious act.
“Nothing that would have made someone take his life,” she said.
Gayle-West was pronounced dead at the scene, near Islington Ave. and St. Andrews Blvd. Police rushed to the scene at around 6 p.m., when gunshots rang out. He was found in the driver’s seat of his car, which had struck a tree.
Gayle-West was remembered by his former colleagues at Rogers Sportsnet and TSN, many of whom expressed their grief via social media, while others took time during regular broadcast of their shows to memorialize the endearing and beloved 29year-old.
Gayle-West was a member of the production team at TSN where he worked with Jay Onrait and Dan O’Toole, BarDown, TSN 1050 and in the newsroom.