Deadly encounter in the chippy city
Even if nothing else had happened, least of all as is alleged here a murder, it was an encounter terrifyingly familiar in any busy big city like Toronto.
Surveillance video shows a man on a skateboard and a cab proceeding west along King Street East in the busy downtown core when, for no reason apparent on the snippet of video, the skater hit the taxi hood with his left hand and bent down, as if saying something to the cabbie.
Frankly, that’s probably enough right there to give any car driver, skater, cyclist or pedestrian a kick to the gut and a flood of adrenalin: This sort of aggressive interaction happens dozens, probably hundreds, of times a day in the chippy city.
But this time, as the video shows, the taxi suddenly lurched to the right and the skater, one arm raised a little, disappeared underneath the front right end of the cab.
The skater was Ralph Bissonnette, a 28-year-old chef (in his backpack were two pairs of striped “Chef ’s Choice” pants and a black apron), originally from Quebec. He died from catastrophic crushing injuries.
The cabbie is 47-year-old Adib Ibrahim, a father of three originally from Ethiopia. He’s now on trial before Ontario Superior Court Judge Rob Clark and a jury, and is pleading not guilty to seconddegree murder in Bissonnette’s death on May 14, 2012.
When the trial opened Tuesday for one day — it resumed Friday — prosecutor Hank Goody told the jurors that, “There was no intersection, side street, driveway or laneway into which the taxi was turning. There was no fare on the north side of the street whom Ibrahim was picking up.”
In other words, Goody suggested, there was no good reason for Ibrahim to suddenly veer to the right.
As he put it, “There was only Ralph Bissonnette on his longboard, between Mr. Ibrahim’s taxi and the north curb.”
This, said Goody in his opening statement, was a death caused by Ibrahim “deliberately driving a motor vehicle at another human being with the intention” of causing his death or being reckless whether it did or not.
But the video snippet may not show the entire interaction between the two men, and as Torontonians have seen before, in such lethal matters, all is not always as clear-cut as it may first appear.
The poster child for just such complications may be the 2009 case of former Ontario attorney general Michael Bryant’s lethal encounter with cyclist Darcy Sheppard.
After an independent investigation showed that Sheppard had
attacked Bryant, who was in his car with his then-wife, and that Sheppard had had six previous altercations with other motorists earlier that day, a special prosecutor from outside Ontario dropped all charges — criminal negligence causing death and dangerous operation of a motor vehicle — against Bryant in 2010.
It’s too soon to know if the Ibrahim-Bissonnette case is at all analogous, but what is perfectly plain is the precarious vulnerability of those who skate or cycle on congested urban streets.
One minute, Bissonnette, a tall man, was cruising along with all the confidence in the world on his longboard — they are longer than skateboards and considered more stable — and the next, he was falling as if no heavier than a piece of gossamer fabric under the wheels of the taxi.
His longboard split in two, apparently, Goody said, with a loud cracking sound, yet the taxi kept moving forward, onto the curb and over Bissonnette’s head and face.
In the witness stand Friday was forensic identification Toronto Police Det.-Sgt. John Smissen, through whom the prosecutor showed the jurors pictures of the scene.
The nose of the longboard was found near a grated sewer, close to a large pool of blood; the tail was half on the curb. Bits of wood and fibreglass and blood dotted the road, Bissonnette’s backpack was on the sidewalk, and his busted bloodied headphones.
In one of these photographs, there is what Smissen called “a ghost image” of the lower legs of an officer who was standing nearby. The ghost image was already more substantial than poor Ralph Bissonnette, his whole life ahead of him one minute, and under a taxi the next.