How eight shots ended Sammy Yatim’s life
It is surely one of the oddities of thoroughly modern and public stories that even when there is cellphone video all over the web and massive media attention, the details, knit together years later in a criminal courtroom, still have such stunning power.
Sammy Yatim was 18 when on a warm summer’s night in Toronto in 2013, he was shot to death on a downtown streetcar.
As prosecutor Milan Rupic told Ontario Superior Court Judge Ed Then and a jury Tuesday, the teenager was “alone inside a stopped streetcar,” with five Toronto police officers standing just outside, three with guns drawn.
One of them, Const. James Forcillo, then with three years and change on the job, fired nine shots in two distinct volleys about five seconds apart, eight of which hit Yatim.
Forcillo was the only officer to fire.
His partner, Const. Iris Fleckeisen, a veteran with 22 years under her belt, initially had her weapon drawn as the two first approached the streetcar, but shortly after, Rupic said, she “decided to stop and holster her handgun.”
The prosecutor was making his opening statement.
From it, the jurors now know some small awful truths.
They know that moments before his death, Yatim told a composed if not outright heroic streetcar driver that he wanted to call his dad; that one of the first three shots severed his spine and paralyzed him from the middle of his chest down; that five of the six in the second volley struck Yatim in the lower abdomen, penis, groin and buttocks — because, of course, the teen had been knocked to the floor of the streetcar when the first shots entered his body.
Heartbreakingly, one of those bullets grazed Yatim’s running shoes, because, again, he was lying on his back at the front of the streetcar, his feet pointing toward Forcillo.
Forcillo and Fleckeisen were the first to the scene in the central-west part of the city.
Police were called because Yatim, who got on the streetcar about 11.45 p.m. on July 26 and was sitting quietly at the rear, suddenly exposed himself to a group of women going home after a Justin Bieber concert, and, with his penis in one hand and a switchblade in the other, abruptly “swung the knife in an arc motion in front of one of the females.”
Rupic said the woman was certainly frightened, but unhurt.
But Forcillo’s lawyer, Peter Brauti, later told the jurors in his opening remarks that when the woman testifies, “she will describe how Mr. Yatim came across the streetcar with the switchblade attempting to slash her throat” and that she believes if she hadn’t jerked back, she wouldn’t be alive.
The women — three adults and a 12-year-old girl — sprinted screaming to get off the streetcar, causing pandemonium.
The streetcar driver, Rupic said, stopped the car as quickly as he could and opened the doors so passengers could escape.
Curiously, though Yatim walked behind the desperate crowd, Rupic said, he was moving at a measured pace. Several passengers are expected to testify that though he “could have stabbed” people, he didn’t.
The streetcar driver stayed with his vehicle, and when Yatim noticed him, he asked if he had a phone. “Yeah I do,” the driver said. “Do you want to call someone?” Yatim said, “Yeah. My dad.”
He then “strolled,” in Rupic’s words, to the rear where he’d been sitting and grabbed his backpack. When he returned to the front of the streetcar, he told the driver, “Go. I’m not going to hold you up for ransom. Get settled. I’m not going to hold you as hostage.”
But the driver stayed, at least for a time.
The escaped passengers, meantime, were calling 911, and just as Yatim was telling the driver he wanted to phone his father, Forcillo and Fleckeisen were dispatched to the scene.
It was a “hotshot,” a priority call.
The dispatcher told them there was a “person with a knife,” “a male on the streetcar,” that the streetcar was stationary now, and gave them a rough description of Yatim.
“No injuries to anyone at this time.”
That was pretty much the extent of the officers’ knowledge at the time: that there was a man with a knife on the streetcar, that it wasn’t moving now; that no one had been hurt.
The jurors, even after only one day of trial, already have more information than the police ever had — perhaps most critically, that the streetcar was empty and Sammy Yatim was found, at autopsy, to have had “moderate or moderate high levels” of Ecstasy in his blood.
The standoff between the 32-year-old officer and the 18-year-old lasted less than 50 seconds.
It consisted mostly of Forcillo repeatedly shouting “Drop the knife!” and “Drop the f---ing knife!” and “Drop it!” and Yatim replying “No” and calling the officers “pussies.”
Forcillo fired the first three shots. One struck Yatim’s spine, paralyzing him; one irreparably damaged his heart (this is the one which killed him); one fractured his right arm.
Five and a half seconds later, believing Yatim was getting up, though of course as the jurors know in fact he could not and would never get up again, Forcillo fired the next six shots.
Cruelly, the sergeant that Forcillo had asked be called to the scene — at that time, only higher-ranking police carried Tasers — arrived after Yatim had taken eight bullets.
The sergeant, Brauti told the jurors, also believed Yatim was refusing to surrender and give up his knife, Tasered him, and kicked the switchblade out of his hand.
Sammy Yatim was physically incapable of surrender, of course. He died shortly after police got the handcuffs on him.