Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Troubled in Toronto
Vahe Minassian leaves court Tuesday in Toronto with a police escort after his son, Alek Minassian, 25, was charged with 10 counts of first-degree murder and 13 counts of attempted murder after a van drove over victims Monday on a Toronto street. Officials said the younger Minassian was socially troubled and had expressed hostility toward women.
TORONTO — The man who drove a rented van along a crowded sidewalk, killing 10 people, was a socially troubled computer science graduate who briefly joined Canada’s military last year and expressed hostility toward women on his Facebook account, according to details that emerged Tuesday.
The man identified by police as the driver, Alek Minassian, 25, was charged in a Toronto court with 10 counts of first-degree murder and 13 counts of attempted murder a day after the van rampage along the sidewalk of a busy Toronto street.
Police have said Minassian, a resident of the Richmond Hill suburb of Toronto, appeared to have intentionally struck the victims in what was likely to count as Canada’s deadliest vehicular attack. Government officials have said the attack did not appear to be an act of terrorism.
The rampage shattered a peaceful Monday afternoon when a white Ryder rental van roared down Yonge Street, a main Toronto thoroughfare, and plowed into pedestrians along a nearly 1-mile stretch. In addition to the 10 killed, 15 were injured.
The driver then stopped the van on a sidewalk and engaged in a standoff with the police, claiming to be armed and daring officers to shoot him in the head, before surrendering.
While police did not disclose a motive for the rampage, interviews with former acquaintances of Minassian, witnesses and others, as well as his now-deleted Facebook account, portray him as a troubled man who had a penchant for computer programming and appeared determined to die.
Authorities raised the possibility that he nursed grudges against women. Those killed and injured were “predominantly” women, Toronto Police Services Detective Sgt. Graham Gibson said at a news conference, without providing details.
Authorities have not yet released a list of victims. Those known to have been killed include a 30-year-old woman from Toronto, Anne Marie D’Amico, who was active in volunteer work, as well as a female student at Seneca College, which Minassian also attended. A Jordanian citizen and two South Koreans were also among those killed.
The gender issue arose because of what police called a “cryptic” Facebook message posted by Minassian just before the attack that suggested he was part of an online community angry over their inability to form relationships with women.
The post saluted Elliot Rodger, a community college student who killed six people and wounded 13 others in shooting and stabbing attacks near the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 2014.
Calling Rodger “the Supreme Gentleman,” the Facebook post declared, “The Incel Rebellion has already begun! We will overthrow all the Chads and Stacys!”
Rodger had used the term “incel” — for involuntarily celibate — in online posts raging at women for rejecting him romantically. Like-minded people in Internet forums sometimes use “Chad” and “Stacy” as dismissive slang for men and women with more robust sex lives.
Minassian’s Facebook account has been suspended, but the company confirmed in an email the authenticity of the posting.
Former classmates who knew Minassian at Thornlea Secondary School in Thornhill, a Toronto suburb, said he had displayed extreme social awkwardness.
“He was an odd guy, and hardly mixed with other students,” said Ari Blaff, a former high school classmate who is now a graduate student in international relations at the University of Toronto. “He had several ticks and would sometimes grab the top of his shirt and spit on it, meow in the hallways and say, ‘I am afraid of girls.’ It was like a mantra.”
Minassian recently graduated from a computer studies program at Seneca College in North York, a Toronto suburb, where he had studied for about seven years.
While he appeared to be skilled at computers, he did not take to military life. The Canadian Department of National Defense said in a statement that Minassian joined the armed forces Aug. 23 and quit two months later, after 16 days of basic training.
While Canadian officials were not characterizing the van rampage as terrorism, it raised fears about Toronto’s vulnerability to a terrorist attack. The scene evoked memories of deadly vehicle rampages carried out by extremists in a number of major Western cities in recent years, including New York; London; Stockholm; Berlin; Barcelona, Spain; and Nice, France.
At the court hearing Tuesday, Judge Stephen Weisberg asked Minassian whether he understood the conditions of a court order not to contact any survivors. “Yes,” he replied in a clear and loud voice.
He was dressed in a white jumpsuit with his hands cuffed behind his back. Seven uniformed police officers surrounded him in the hearing room.
Minassian was represented at the hearing by a court-appointed lawyer with whom he had an extended, whispered conversation from a prisoners’ box.
He was being held without bail.
Witnesses described a sequence of horrific scenes.
David Alce, a 53-year-old network engineer, was waiting at a traffic light at Yonge Street and Finch Avenue on his way to the park to enjoy a sunny day off when he saw a white van careening across the intersection.
About 1:20 p.m., Alce said, his initial disbelief turned to shock and then horror as the speeding van cut through the intersection, mounted the curb and began to swerve and mow people down.
Alce, an Ottawa native, said he moved to Toronto about 20 years ago, drawn by the city’s peaceful atmosphere and lack of crime. He said the attack had destroyed the “innocence” of the city.