Danzig community looks to move on
Four years after the shooting, residents balk at the stigma, revel in small-town vibe
Try to order pizza on Danzig St., Alesha Wilson says.
You might hear, “You live where?” Or: “We’re not going to come there.” Pizza guys have been known to make you run out to the street to pick up the pie, Wilson says. Because isn’t this the dangerous place where that crazy shooting went down?
The July 2012 shooting branded the very word “Danzig” with images and memories of pain and death. Twenty-five people were struck in a frenzy of flying bullets during a neighbourhood party. Two young lives ended that night: Shyanne Charles was 14, remembered by loved ones as funny and vivacious; Joshua Yasay, a York University grad at 23, coached basketball in his spare time.
Wilson can point to the spots where their bodies fell. Her friend, Tashawna Stevens, will show you the bullet holes in the tree outside her front door. Beneath a misty drizzle on a weekday morning, they wipe down and display the memorial placards that hang on the brick walls of the townhouses, near the rusting playground, where the violence broke out — the worst mass shooting in Toronto history.
With the verdict in the trial of the young man who, as a teenager, allegedly triggered the bloodshed when he started shooting that night, the time might finally have come for the neighbourhood to slide out from under the incident’s shadow.
Like many people on Danzig St., Stevens and Wilson want to move on — but they don’t want to forget.
“As much as we’d love to see these kids back, it’s not going to happen,” says Stevens, a 24-year-old mother in pink pyjama pants and a thin leather jacket. “It’s about time. It’s about time for it to be over.”
Wilson cuts in. “Closure,” she says. “For the parents more than anybody.”
On the other side of a row of houses, Leonie Davy talks about her three children. Just weeks after she moved to Danzig with her family, the shoot- ing erupted on the other side of her unit’s back wall.
“I was scared as hell,” she says now from the cement porch of her twostorey townhouse.
Her kids were sleeping and everyone was safe. But the incident rattled her. What kind of place was this?
It turns out, with almost four years of Danzig living under her belt, Davy will attest that the area known officially as “Morningside-Coronation” by the Toronto Community Housing Corporation is exceedingly neighbourly.
“I can leave my door open all night. I have no fear of anything,” says the 39-year-old, who comes home in the early hours of the morning from her bartending job. She smiles broadly when it’s suggested that she’s talking like she lives in a small town.
“Since (the shooting) happened, people have come together,” she says. “Everybody for everybody.”
The community feels like any other neighbourhood. Bundled-up people walk to and fro carrying groceries, kids run along the sidewalks and residents wave to each other from either side of the street.
Like many places in the city, violence has sporadically occurred: a mother of three was stabbed to death there last year. But residents say they feel safe here and that any outside perception of danger is part of the shooting’s sad legacy. Some resent that. “It’s a touchy subject,” says Wilson, 21. Her own friends will sometimes make comments about her neighbourhood, suggesting they’re scared to visit. But she says she’s been walking home at night alone since she was 10 or 11 and has never felt afraid.
Mushtaba Jalili stands behind the screen door of his family’s unit, nodding his head. Sometimes it’s loud here, and his parents and siblings are saving up so that they can move elsewhere, he says. But it’s not like the place is ridden with crime and gangs and violence. Since “the incident,” as he calls it, things have been pretty calm.
“I notice it from my friends sometimes,” says the 22-year-old University of Toronto student, when asked about negative perceptions of Danzig, “but once you live here, it’s not that bad.” Two doors down, Ziedo Caine shrugs. He’s lived on Danzig only a couple of weeks. The place seems pretty safe to him, he says, especially compared to his last neighbourhood, in the Jane and Finch area. Caine, 25, says he was shot outside his home on June 18, after arguing with two strangers on the street. The bullet injured his leg beneath the left hip and struck his lower right leg, he says.
“Since I moved here, I never had any problems,” says Caine, who is originally from the island of Saint Vincent in the Caribbean. “Everybody is very friendly to me.”
Back on her front stoop near the shooting scene, Stevens lights a cigarette. She puffs smoke and glances toward the old playground that TCHC has promised to replace. This place may not be perfect, she says — her front yard is a reminder of the tragedy that played out there. But she feels good about raising her sixyear-old daughter on Danzig St. The little girl presses her face against the screen door behind her mother, giggling.
Maybe now, Stevens says, as the legal cases from the shooting come to a close, the association of her neighbourhood with death and danger will eventually unravel.
“Before the shooting, nobody knew about Danzig . . . As much as it will go down in history and people will talk about it, I’m glad it’s over.”