Early morning shooting shocks Mount Royal
In the 37 years she’s called a quiet corner of Mount Royal home, Pat Moore has become accustomed to the familiar sights and sounds of her neighbourhood.
“The school buses go right past our house,” she says of the regular morning routine just a stone’s throw from an elementary school. “I usually sit by the front window and have my coffee.”
On Monday morning, the usual parade of yellow school buses doesn’t materialize, classes having wrapped up for the holiday season the previous Friday. One other thing out of place on Moore’s street usually filled with children walking to school at this time of day: the sound of gun shots, less than 30 metres from her house.
“It was a bam, bam, bam, like something hitting a wall,” says the Calgary philanthropist, who, with her husband Sherrold Moore, has for decades donated time and money to a variety of charitable causes. “I’ve never heard gun shots before, so I thought it was something else, like a truck backfiring.”
Within minutes, though, the street that sides her home was filled with police cars, and Moore’s property was encircled with yellow police tape.
“I can’t remember anything like this before,” she says when asked if violence has ever visited the street where she knows everyone’s names and has been in most homes. “It is pretty shocking and quite sad, especially just before Christmas.”
At just before the lunch hour, Moore takes me to her upstairs sitting area, where outside the window one can see a black Rolls-Royce in the middle of the street. The front of the vehicle is smashed in, bullet holes dot the windshield and the driver’s side front door and the back passenger door are left open. The car sits just off the driveway of one of the city’s most expensive homes, a nearly 10,000-square-foot mansion owned by real estate developer Riaz Mamdani that was built in 1912 by survivors of the Titanic. In 2009, the home was assessed at over $11 million.
It’s a scene that in my nearly 40 years in Calgary, I’ve never witnessed in this upscale residential neighbourhood, one of the city’s most coveted addresses.
As the hackneyed saying goes, these things just simply don’t happen here — until now, of course.
Not long after the shooting, police officers and firefighters were called to an alley a few blocks south, where they found a vehicle on fire. At the time of this writing, police had yet to connect the two incidents or even name the victim in hospital in critical but stable condition. At a news conference later in the day, though, Staff Sgt. Travis Baker tells reporters that police believe it was a targeted attack.
“The shooter definitely knew where he was and who he was going after.”
It’s all a bit much for the residents of this community, who come out throughout the day to see for themselves the aftermath of the violence. On Mamdani’s lawn, a deflated snowman lies in the snow.
“Their house is awash in Christmas lights at night,” says one woman who doesn’t want to give her name. “We call the property ‘the fortress’ because of the high walls.”
It was a bam, bam, bam, like something hitting a wall. I’ve never heard gun shots before, so I thought it was something else, like a truck backfiring.
While she only knew the Mamdanis to say hello, the violence just outside her door doesn’t dissuade Pat Moore from answering it — and offering those shivering outside a cup of coffee and homemade cookies.
“This can happen anywhere,” she says with a sigh. Her husband, Sherrold, agrees. “It shouldn’t happen anywhere.”