IS THIS 19-YEAR-OLD’S DEATH A CONVICTED GUN SMUGGLER’S FAULT?
Police allege the weapon was sold in Florida and brought across the border. How an ‘unprecedented’ negligence charge may open a new front in Toronto’s battle with gun violence
On a December night in 2019, Peter Petrov Simov was keeping an eye on a west Toronto compound filled with vehicles damaged in accidents, part of his job as a security guard for a GTA tow truck company. He’d taken the minimum wage gig hoping it would be quiet, leaving him time to study physics so he could eventually become a pilot.
During that shift, in what may have been an accidental self-inflicted discharge, Simov died of a gunshot wound to the head, the bullet fired from an illegal handgun. He was 19 years old.
In the wake of Simov’s death, a little-known team of provincial firearms tracing experts set to work sourcing the gun that killed him — ultimately, they allege, connecting the dots to a 2019 sale in Florida, and a convicted gun trafficker.
It was a unique opportunity to lay a charge investigators have been mulling for years. Last week, Toronto man Jeffrey Gilmour made his first court appearance for criminal negligence causing death, a charge laid for allegedly selling the illegal firearm that killed Simov.
Believed to be unprecedented in Canada, investigators hope the charge is a new way to stop rising gun violence and stem the flow of illegal handguns, the vast proportion of which police say are being smuggled in from the United States.
“It’s an evolution of the way that we’re looking at reducing firearms trafficking, thereby reducing the number of guns on the street,” said Toronto police Det.-Sgt. Robert DiDanieli, who heads the Toronto police firearms enforcement unit.
Gilmour, 44, was already sentenced to three-and-a-half years in jail for gun trafficking after he was caught at the border attempting to smuggle handguns into Canada. If convicted of the criminal negligence count — one of 10 new offences Gilmour faces — he could face life in prison.
Christopher O’Connor, the lawyer who represented Gilmour in a brief court appearance last week, told the Star he believes the charges are an overreach. He said his client is innocent and intends to fight the charges.
“I’ve never seen anything like it in 11 years of practice,” O’Connor said.
The criminal negligence charge has been greeted with cautious optimism by Simov’s family, who last year filed a lawsuit against Paramount Towing and Alexander Vinogradsky — the GTA tow truck operator Simov was working for when he died at the lot near Dufferin Street and Finch Avenue West.
The lawsuit alleges Paramount Towing supplied Simov with an illegally obtained and possessed firearm, and claims Simov sent text messages to his girlfriend a few hours before he was pronounced dead, saying his employer “has offered him a firearm and that he has taken it.”
The allegations in the lawsuit have not been proven in court and Vinogradsky has not replied to multiple requests for comment.
Vinogradsky is separately charged with several organized crime offences in connection to a crackdown on the GTA towing industry called “Project Platinum.”
Nadezhda Simova said her brother had no brushes with the law, not even speeding tickets, adding that he had never owned a gun nor showed interest in them.
Simova, who recently became a lawyer, said she hopes a criminal negligence charge — and added prison time — might make gun traffickers think twice. But she worries the Crown might have a tough time proving the charge in court.
“It’s great but it’s very, very hard to prove causation,” said Simova — namely, that the sale of the gun caused the death.
DiDanieli said there’s precedent for liability in other scenarios, including holding bartenders accountable for overserving customers who then drive drunk and cause an accident.
Drug traffickers have also been charged over deaths linked to narcotics they’ve sold. Last month, an Edmonton drug dealer was sentenced to six years in jail for criminal negligence causing death after selling fentanyl to a 39-year-old man who later died.
With the illegal sale of guns, a trafficker can have little doubt the weapon will be used for “nefarious purposes,” DiDanieli said. The seller can’t claim they didn’t know the buyer was a gang member, for instance, he said.
“Who else is paying you $5,000 for a $300 gun?” DiDanieli said.
Within 24 hours of police announcing Gilmour’s new charge, DiDanieli said he got a call from an investigator out west who intends to lay a criminal negligence causing death charge under similar circumstances.
The idea was the brainchild of Toronto police Det. Scott Ferguson, who heads the firearms analysis and tracing enforcement (FATE) program, a part of the Criminal Intelligence Service of Ontario.
Created in 1994 but rarely in the limelight, FATE’s team of eight — which includes agents with Canada Border Service Agency (CBSA) and the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — has a mandate to source every crime gun seized across the province.
In 2019, they were tasked with sourcing more than 2,000 guns, Ferguson said, a count they’re likely to match once the final tally comes in for 2020. Guns are still getting across the border even amid COVID-19 closures, Ferguson said.
“And it’s our job to determine how that happened,” he said.
Ferguson said he’s been advocating to charge gun traffickers with criminal negligence causing death since 2015, when he said two teenagers were killed by the same smuggled gun within the span of a month. According to Ferguson, among them was 14-year-old Lecent Ross, who died inside a Jamestown Crescent home in what was described in court as an accidental shooting.
Ferguson says he has since become “passionate” about holding gun smugglers accountable for the deaths that flow from their illegal sales — “to me, (that) act contributed to the deaths.”
Approximately 80 per cent of the handguns seized in Ontario within the last decade have been sourced to the U.S., Ferguson said.
According to CBSA statistics provided to the Star this week, 270 firearms were seized in Ontario in 2020 — down from 373 in 2019, but greater than the 247 seized just four years before, in 2016.
Eventually, the wider adoption of more severe charges against traffickers could help reduce gun violence, DiDanieli said.
“I think it’s fair to say that this could be another tool to stem the flow,” he said.
O’Connor, Gilmour’s lawyer, said the charges raise a “whole host of issues,” including that his client may be tried twice for the same offence.
According to O’Connor, while his client was on trial following the 2019 arrest, police pegged him to a large cache of guns that were not reflected in the original charges, but were later considered by the court as an aggravating factor on sentencing. The new charges could create a double jeopardy situation, he said.
A Crown prosecutor on the Gilmour case declined to comment while the matter is before the courts.
Veteran Toronto defence lawyer John Struthers, president of the Criminal Lawyers’ Association, thinks it may be difficult to prove criminal negligence charge in court, calling it “overreach.”
“I think this may be more out of frustration than anything else,” he said.
Struthers added that guns can also pass through multiple hands before being used in a crime, and “at some point you divest your responsibility,” Struthers said.
Gilmour’s case is back in court this month.