Drug store stabbing
What could prompt such a horrific act?
Both faces are hauntingly beautiful.
A young newlywed bride on what was likely the happiest day of her life — mere months ago.
Another woman of such classically symmetrical features that the photograph could have been part of a model’s portfolio.
No evidence that they’d ever seen each other before until Rosemarie Junor fatefully — and fatally — allegedly crossed paths a week ago with Rohinie Bisesar at the Shoppers Drug Mart beneath the Toronto-Dominion Centre.
Junor was presumably doing a bit of shopping, rushing in and rushing out as one does on a busy Friday afternoon with the weekend looming. And Bisesar, who can say what she had in her churning, possibly deranged mind? A person who may have been homeless but certainly didn’t fill the outward appearance of vagrant existence: Neatly dressed, well-groomed, polished. If mentally fraying for quite some time, as friends have indicated, it wasn’t apparent to the casual observer. A familiar figure at a couple of downtown Starbucks where she’d sit for hours on end with laptop open, sometimes so far away in her thoughts that staff would have to repeatedly prompt her for an order before the blank face focused. How did she get from the woman she’d once been, so exceedingly educated in business programs — though not all university degrees and professional claims posted on social media have been confirmed as truthful — so kindly regarded by acquaintances, to an assailant with a knife, alleged stranger killer in a horrific act of seeming randomness.
So excruciatingly bizarre that the news item was carried on American networks and newspapers overseas. It resonated. We have only the words Bisesar is believed to have sent to a newspaper after the attack, or at least they appear to have originated from an authenticated email address. As the National Post revealed a few days ago, they had received an email from Bisesar only 10 minutes before she was arrested by police following a massive manhunt for the female who plunged a knife into Junor’s chest, a mortal wound to which the 28-year-old succumbed several days later.
“Do you know any top professionals in artificial intelligence, biotechnology, nanotechnology, satellites?” the writer asks, as quoted in the Post article. “Something has been happening to me and this is not my normal self and I would like to know who and why this is happening.”
According to the Post, the email continues with the correspondent addressing the stabbing: “I am sorry about the incidence. I felt the need to be extreme to see if it would work. I would normally not do such a thing.”
And we have two court appearances the petite 40-year-old Bisesar has made since Tuesday’s arrest, including Friday’s brief up-and-down, her charges elevated to seconddegree murder.
Dressed in a forest green sweat suit — not the purple blouse or the white blouse in which Bisesar had often been seen over the last year, articles of clothing she reportedly washed and ironed every day at a gym she frequented (not recently) — the accused stared impassively straight ahead, didn’t speak during the hearing, but passed a folded piece of paper to her defence lawyer, Calvin Barry, and whispered to him afterwards before being taken from the courtroom.
Outside the courthouse, Barry described his client as very upset.
“It’s like a deer in the headlights,” he said of Bisesar, whom he portrayed as “very meek and quiet.”
Which is exactly as various people who’ve had both fleeting and more consistent contact with the woman have characterized her — docile, sweet, but “odd” and increasingly paranoid, depressed over her inability to find stable employment since completing her MBA nearly a decade ago. Relying, often, on the kindness of strangers for a place to sleep, to be, and purportedly estranged from her family.
She had no family in court Friday, as far as could be determined.
While another family grieves its unfathomable loss.
Barry told reporters Bisesar was having a rough time at Vanier Detention Centre in Milton. “She’s going to take it one day at a time.”
Communicating with his client has been difficult, Barry added. “There’s all kinds of other prisoners, similar to American TV. Everybody’s yelling and screaming.”
No date for a bail hearing has been set.
There are so many mentally ill souls in our midst. We brush past them every day, sometimes recognizing their brainsickness, sometimes not.
Most, like the homeless — and a great many of the severely disturbed descend to a state of “no fixed address” — pose no threat, except to themselves.
And then one day somebody pushes a stranger onto the subway tracks. Or takes a snow plow for a calamity spin, killing a police officer. Or decapitates a passenger on a Greyhound bus.
A good man is stabbed to death while out for a stroll on a Toronto street, earlier this week, in what police describe as a robbery attempt. That’s horrific and harrowing too, no less damaging to our collective equilibrium, our sense of living in a metropolis so much safer than most. You think, need to believe: That can’t happen to me. What are the odds?
For Rosemarie Junor, the odds sharpened to the tip of a knife blade, plunging.
Was she looking in her killer’s eyes? Did she have time to wonder, why? Who are you?
Rohinie walked out unimpeded. With files from Daniel Otis Rosie DiManno usually appears Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.