Officer denies he shot teen on a ‘hunch’
Streetcar shooting: 18-year-old posed an imminent threat, court hears
James Forcillo’s five days in the witness box ended with neither a bang nor a whimper, to borrow from the American poet T.S. Eliot.
The 32-year-old Toronto police constable was testifying in his own defence at his criminal trial on charges of second-degree murder and attempted murder in the July 27, 2013 streetcar shooting death of Sammy Yatim.
The murder charge relates to the first volley of three shots, including the fatal one to the 18-year-old’s heart, Forcillo fired that night.
The attempted murder charge is tied to a second volley of six shots he fired at a then-prone Yatim, who was thrown to the floor of the vehicle by the first burst, about five seconds later.
After more than two days in cross-examination by prosecutor Milan Rupic, Forcillo was briefly re-examined by his lead lawyer, Peter Brauti, and seized the chance to rebuke Rupic for a genuinely strange suggestion he made.
Rupic last week seriously suggested one of the reasons Forcillo didn’t try pepper spray on Yatim, who was brandishing a switchblade at the front doors of the streetcar, was “because you had in the back of your mind that it is really a headache to use because of the after-spray cleanup that’s involved?”
( Pepper spray requires police use a decontamination process.)
At the time, Forcillo was clearly stung, and told the prosecutor, “The fact that I’d have to change my uniform and clean up afterwards, if it means not taking a life, is a meaningless consequence.”
Tuesday, asked about it by Brauti, Forcillo was obviously still smarting.
“You know,” he said, “out of the many suggestions from Mr. Rupic, that’s got to be one of the most insulting … to me. (He’s saying) I’m such a callous individual that I would rather kill someone than change my uniform and take a shower.”
Earlier in the day, as he was wrapping up his cross, Rupic repeated accusations similar to those he asked Forcillo at the start.
He suggested the officer, who had about three and a half years on the job at the time, felt angry and “disrespected” by the mouthy, drug-addled teen (Yatim had recently consumed ecstasy and marijuana) who kept calling him “a pussy” as he flatly refused to drop his blade, and suggested Forcillo had “rushed” the confrontation by not simply waiting Yatim out.
At one point, Rupic even accused Forcillo of shooting “on the mere hunch he (Yatim) was coming off the streetcar?” Rupic said.
“No,” Forcillo said emphatically. “It was not a hunch.
“Believe me, I think about this all the time, I’ve played this a million times in my mind — it’s not a hunch.
“I one hundred per cent believed he was coming off the streetcar.”
That is Forcillo’s fundamental justification for shooting Yatim — that he believed the teen “had made a decision” and was coming off the vehicle to attack him.
While virtually all the events of the night were captured on video, none of it is definitive on the question of what Yatim was doing when he was shot.
As Yatim moved back, Forcillo explicitly warned him not to move forward or he’d be shot.
Video shows he took one full step and a half toward the front of the vehicle, where he’d been standing earlier; that he still had the knife in his right hand; that he was neither running nor lunging nor even hurrying.
The distance Yatim covered was about 50 centimetres, or about a foot-and-a-half, and an expert testified he was moving at .357 metres a second, which Rupic said translates to about 1.28 kilometres an hour.
But Forcillo said he was also watching Yatim’s face, and that it was flushed, that his jaw set and his features hardened.
“He looked to me like he was making a decision to come off the streetcar,” he said, and as he watched this, audio captured Forcillo shouting, “Don’t move!” and a final “Drop it!” before the first shots rang out.
Rupic was not deterred. Forcillo shot Yatim, he said, “because he had the temerity to take a step and a half in your direction at a snail’s pace?”
“No,” Forcillo replied. “I shot Mr. Yatim because I believed he was an imminent threat to my life.”
As for the second volley of shots, Rupic said Forcillo ought to have known Yatim was probably badly wounded and could have just waited a bit, to see if the teenager managed to get to his feet.
Forcillo, of course, couldn’t have known Yatim was paralyzed from the waist down from one of the first shots. “I saw a man re-arm himself with his knife,” he said, “and he would only do that to continue his attack.”
Video shows that as Yatim fell, the knife flew out of his hand, but he reached over with his left arm and grabbed it in a twohanded grasp.
Rupic saved his best question for last.
Earlier, he roused Forcillo to deliver what was for him a little speech, during which the officer said police aren’t paid to get stabbed, and that, “I’m going to be absolutely blunt with you. When I was dealing with Mr. Yatim, I was going home that night … one way or the other, Mr. Rupic, I’m going home at the end of that night.”
Rupic referred to that outburst and said, “You failed in your duty to give Mr. Yatim the opportunity to go home,” to which Forcillo replied, “I gave Mr. Yatim nothing but opportunity.”
The trial continues Wednesday, now with 11 jurors after one was discharged late in the day. Ontario Superior Court Justice Ed Then told the remaining jurors the move “has nothing to do with the issues in this case.”