Students get bail at raucous hearing
Parents angry at school and police Sexual assault charges called ‘injustice’
In a courtroom overflowing with media, police and supporters of the accused, 14 of the young people charged with sexually assaulting a teenager were granted bail yesterday after a tense, sometimes raucous hearing. The accused, all students at James Cardinal McGuigan Catholic Secondary School in North York, were among 16 arrested after a 16- year-old girl told police she had been sexually assaulted repeatedly since September 2004. The allegations and arrests have raised disturbing questions about school safety, policecommunity relations and race. Police said most of the alleged assaults occurred in or near the school.
Parents have complained that school and police officials were
slow to inform them of the charges. All of those arrested are black, while the accuser is white. The 14 accused, who can’t be identified under the Youth Criminal Justice Act, appeared before a justice of the peace in the Ontario Court of Justice on Finch Ave. W. and were led into the courtroom in small groups. After being arrested at school Monday and spending the night in jail, many of them still wore the black slacks and white shirts of their school uniform. When the first group of five youths crammed into the prisoner’s box, each of them gazed out over the courtroom, trying to make eye contact with friends or relatives. The crowd grumbled loudly when the accused were referred to as prisoners by the Crown, prompting the justice of the peace to warn them to stay quiet. “They ain’t prisoners,” one person blurted in an angry whisper. The 14, all suspended from the school, were released on $ 1,500 bail and ordered not to contact each other or the victim. They also must stay away from the school, give up their cell phones and pagers, and attend every class if another school admits them. Besides trips to school and to their lawyers’ offices, they must stay at home unless they are out with their sureties. The 14 will return to court Nov. 25. The other two accused, charged last week, were released on bail last week. One of the youths broke into a broad grin yesterday when he learned he had made bail, but outside the courtroom the mother of one of the boys said there’s nothing to smile about.
“ What they are doing to these kids is an injustice,” said the woman, who can’t be identified. “ We need to get together as a black community because it is our kids who are being treated unjustly. Two years from now when my son wants to get a job, when he wants to go to college, I don’t want him to have a record.” She said her son wasn’t involved and wondered whether an assault actually took place, since it took so long to report.
“ If, in fact, it did happen, I feel for her,” the mother said. “ If I had a daughter like her, I would give her the support she needed, but I wouldn’t wait ( so long). It is very suspicious. I’m not saying it didn’t happen, ( but) it’s very suspicious.”
Upstairs, another set of relatives fumed as they waited to complete the bail paperwork. They blame the school for not informing parents quickly, and the police for questioning suspects without lawyers or parents present. The mother of one of the youths said the school never called to say her son had been arrested. Instead, she heard the news from a man with the same last name whom the school had phoned by mistake. He had called her, a complete stranger, to relay the school’s message. When the woman’s adult daughter phoned the school to check on her brother, she got no answers, she said. And when she arrived at 31 Division Monday afternoon she found television news crews and another group of mothers looking for their sons and answers.
“ Not to be racist, but I didn’t see one white person in there,” the sister said. “ All these black parents were there, puzzled.” The mother said the police told them little and she didn’t know for sure her son had been arrested and charged until 2 a. m. when he finally phoned home.
“ He said, ‘ I don’t even know the girl,’ ” his mother said. “ He said, ‘ it’s cold in jail.’ ” The women quickly signed a petition, circulated by the mothers of the accused, demanding McGuigan’s principal, James Matthews, resign due to “ racial profiling, prejudice and discrimination.” Matthews was at school yesterday but wasn’t speaking to the media. But many students were, and they described a student body skeptical of the charges, and angry that so many popular students — some of them athletes — are gone. They described the accused students as “ fun,” even if they didn’t always take school seriously.
“ They make school live,” another girl said. “Without them, our school is dead.” Most kids smoking cigarettes on the school’s front steps showed little sympathy for the alleged victim. The boys thought she made up the charges, but the group’s lone girl stood up for her.
“ Do any of you guys know what it’s like to be a girl?” she asked. “ Her self- esteem must be so low right now. None of the attention is ever on the victim.
“ Ever.
“ They’re not talking about the fact that a little girl is at home right now crying.”
Another group of students worried that the allegations would give a good school a bad name.
“ Other people are going to look at us differently,” one girl said. “ Universities aren’t going to want to look at us. Everything we’ve worked for is just shattered. Most of us have potential. Where does that leave us now?”