‘This is just not fair’: 14-year-old girl’s shooting adds to neighbourhood’s trauma
Teenager shot in head expected to survive, after latest tragedy involving youth in Jane-Finch
A 14-year-old girl is expected to survive after she was shot in the head early Friday in a shocking, possibly accidental injury that left neighbours in her Jane and Finch neighbourhood with feelings of déjà vu.
Much of what happened inside an apartment at 25 Stong Court in the early hours of Friday morning is still unknown. After receiving a call just before 3 a.m., police arrived at the building and found the girl shot in the head and critically injured.
She was rushed to the Hospital for Sick Children. According to acting Staff Supt. Pauline Gray, the latest medical information Friday was that the girl is expected to survive — “and for that we are grateful.”
The shooting is the latest of numerous incidents of gun violence in the area. According to a recent Star analysis Toronto police tweets, the neighbourhood around Jane Street and Driftwood Avenue, including nearby
Stong Court, saw the city’s greatest volume of police activity involving gun violence last year.
Experts and local residents point to “severe, undiagnosed trauma” that can come from living with the “everyday reality” of gun violence and police activity.
Waking up to news of yet another shooting incident — the victim another child — is devastating, said Shamso Elmi, a nearby resident and community activist who spoke to the Star on Friday.
The building where the girl was shot is near the Stong Court parking lot where 12-year-old bystander Dante Andreatta Marroquin was fatally shot while walking with his mother last November — a crime that rocked the neighbourhood around Jane and Driftwood. On Friday, a memorial to the slain boy could still be seen covered in snow, steps from the girl’s apartment building.
“This is just not fair, for the children, for the mothers,” Elmi said. She doesn’t know the girl’s family personally, but people in the community were saddened by the news.
“Every week it’s two or three youth we are burying or sending to Sunnybrook (hospital). That is not acceptable,” she said. “I hope and pray that that kid gets better but the level of violence here, it’s just too much.”
Elmi is among the group of Somali mothers who are part of an initiative called Mending a Crack in the Sky. Last year they signed a memorandum of understanding with Toronto police, giving them an active role in trying to reduce acts of violence affecting their communities.
Having lost a son to gun violence herself, she said the continued cycle of shootings disproportionately impacts Black and racialized communities, leaving wounds and scars that go beyond the families directly affected.
“The mental health impact is huge. Everyone in the community, we are afraid,” she said.
At a media scrum Friday, Gray said the shooting may have been accidental but the investigation was in its early stages. She added that police are not yet calling anyone a suspect because they don’t yet know what happened inside the apartment.
“We have one piece of the puzzle right now. And that is this young lady. We need the other pieces to come forward,” Gray said.
Police believe several people in the apartment at the time were minors, though at least one adult was also in the home at the time, Gray told reporters, adding that investigators aren’t sure of the number of people who fled the scene, but said it was more than one.
She implored anyone who was present to contact police — “do yourselves a favour, get your parents, seek counsel and come on in and tell your side of the story.”
Gray would not comment on the relationship between the girl and others present at the shooting.
The girl’s shooting was not the only one nearby early Friday. At about 4:35 a.m., about 90 minutes after the young girl was shot, a man was shot in the face on Songwood Drive, near Islington Avenue and Finch Avenue West.
According to Toronto police Supt. Ron Taverner, the man in his early 20s was outside his vehicle when two men approached him and shot over 20 rounds, striking him at least twice.
He was rushed to a nearby hospital and is in critical condition. Taverner said police “hope and expect that he will live.”
Taverner asked community members outraged by the continued rash of shootings to come forward to police about those they know have guns.
“When you see these types of tragedies over and over, young people being affected as they are, it’s disturbing,” said Taverner.
There has been a rash of fatal shootings in the city recently, with three people shot to death in a 24-hour period earlier this week.
After the high-profile shooting of 12year-old Andreatta Marroquin on Nov. 7, Toronto saw just one more fatal shooting before the new year — a relatively calm end to what had previously been on pace to be another year of nearrecord gun violence.
Reacting to the shooting in Jane and Finch, as well as a drive-by shooting in Montreal that left a 15-year-old girl dead, members of the Canadian Doctors for Protection from Guns called the two tragedies “shocking and unacceptable,” and a wake-up call to do better.
“No doctor wants to have to take a parent into the ‘quiet room’ to explain to them their child has not survived the brutality of a bullet. No doctor wants to meet another parent who will never be themselves again because we as a society have failed their child,” the group wrote in a statement posted to their website.
The group called for a comprehensive action that addresses big challenges in communities such as poverty and racism. Governments should also ramp up efforts to restrict access to guns that are used to commit these crimes, they said.
“Health workers try to heal the injured. Policy-makers must do more to prevent these injuries.
“It is the least we must do for our children,” the statement adds.
Speaking on CP24 Friday, Mayor John Tory said ongoing violence is linked to gang activity. “When sort of a spur of activity has happened like this, oftentimes in geographic areas that are not far from one another, it’s related to some retaliatory activity between and among gang,” he said.
“These are tragedies any which way you look at them and no matter what the cause is,” Tory added.
On CBC Radio’s “Metro Morning,” Tory again addressed the girl’s shooting:
“You’re left with a question that sort of says to yourself, what circumstances, and it’s many and it’s complicated but what circumstances could have led with the way it seems to be unfolding for people to have been in an apartment with a 14-year-old girl at 2 o’clock in the morning with guns.”