‘My family is broken,’ mom says
Lecent Ross’s mother mourns painful anniversary, lack of improvement in gun violence
She should have turned 15 last month.
On June11, Lecent Ross should have been celebrating her 15th birthday and by now should have just finished her first year of high school.
But instead of throwing her a birthday party last month, Lecent’s friends and family were planting flowers on her grave. And today, they’ll be marking the first anniversary of her death — 12 months since the14-year-old was shot and killed by a single bullet fired from an illegal handgun while she was at her friend’s Rexdale home, just a stone’s throw from her own.
And precious little has changed since then, her mother told the Star — not the pain of loss, not the cycle of gun violence that took Lecent’s life.
“My family is broken,” Alicia Jasquith said in an interview at her home on Jamestown Cres., the same one she had moved into just three years ago with Lecent and her two younger children. “We’re still broken.” In the wave of shooting deaths in Toronto over the last year, Lecent’s story stands out because it starts off so innocently — a bunch of kids and a parent in a house. But somehow, an illegal gun was in there, too. Somehow, a single shot was fired and someone inside called 911. And less than an hour after being rushed to a hospital, Lecent was pronounced dead.
The circumstances and result were shocking, even for veteran police officers.
“In my 26 years of policing,” Det. Rich Petrie, the original lead investigator on the case, told the Star in an email, “this is the one case that haunts me.”
The current lead investigator, Homicide Det. Susan Gomes, could not comment on specifics of the case, but said she’s also saddened when investigating cases “where such young people are involved.”
It’s been a “very difficult” year since then, said Jasquith, who’s been coping with the help of daily visits from family and friends. Her mother, who flew in from the U.S. for the first anniversary, comforted her as she spoke. Jasquith said she misses her eldest daughter’s “laughter, her willingness to speak her mind.”
“She just knew how to light up a room anywhere she went. . . . Me and her lived like sisters, best friends. I could come in, tell her anything, anything at all.”
Lecent, who had dreams of becoming a lawyer, was also very close to her three siblings, Jasquith said: an older brother, who lives in Scarborough, and a little brother and sister, now 5 and 8, who Lecent used to help care for.
“Every day they talk about her,” Jasquith said. “‘Mommy, we miss Lecent. Is she ever going to come back?’ ” Jasquith said.
“My son, we were walking past the house where it happened and he goes, ‘I told Lecent not to go to that house, you know, Mommy.’ ”
Even before her own death, Lecent was no stranger to the tragedy of gun violence.
On March 21, 2015, her 17-year-old friend Trevor Seraphine was gunned down “in cold blood” outside an apartment near Eglinton Ave. W. and Martin Grove Rd.; his only mistake, a detective said at the time, was walking from one friend’s apartment to another while two “predators” with no apparent connection to him were in the parking lot.
Nine days later, and even closer to home, 46-year-old stay-at-home-dad Donald Beckles was shot multiple times while smoking on the porch of his Jamestown Cres. home; Lecent was good friends with his daughter. Beckles’ murder remains unsolved. Jasquith knew both Trevor and the Beckles family; she also knows relatives of Candice Rochelle Bobb, the pregnant woman shot dead while sitting in a car on Jamestown Cres. in May.
“It just continued; it’s like a cycle,” Jasquith said of Bobb’s shooting. “It just keeps continuing. There has to be a change somewhere.”
Five weeks after Lecent was shot, a 13-year-old boy was arrested and charged with manslaughter, and an 18-year-old man, with criminal negligence and giving a false statement. Both were also charged with a slew of gun-related offences, including unauthorized possession of a firearm and possession of a prohibited firearm with ammunition, and are scheduled to appear in court again this fall.
But despite the public outcry for a crackdown on gun violence following Lecent’s death — and Trevor’s, and Beckles’ — shootings are still a problem in Toronto, particularly in the northwest area, said Ron Taverner, the superintendent for Toronto police’s 23 Division in northern Etobicoke that includes Rexdale.
“The fact remains that illegal guns are a huge issue for . . . innocent people being shot, wounded, terrorized,” Taverner said in a phone interview, noting that the number of shootings are up this year compared to last.
Police are making “some concentrated efforts” to deal with gun violence, like increasing patrols in “high-risk areas” and sending out dedicated teams to investigate every shooting, but Taverner emphasized that “the police can’t do this alone.”
“We need people to come forward when things are happening or they hear information, to share that information with us,” Taverner said. “As much as it might be tough on, let’s say, a mother or father to say that their kid has a gun in their bedroom, they may be saving their life or someone else’s life. And yes, there will be consequences, no question about that, but you have to accept that the consequences may be way less than what would happen if they shoot someone or they shot themselves.”
Lecent’s uncle, Troy Amos-Ross, said he’s never spoken to the teens or anyone else who was in the house where Lecent was shot, but hopes that they have learned from “all the pain” her death caused. Whatever’s being done about gun violence is “never enough,” he said, and called on the community to “stand together” to prevent yet another “senseless crime,” instead of waiting for another tragedy to happen.
“We need to educate these young people about guns,” he said. “You see it day to day, it happens, where someone gets shot, unfortunately, because a misfire of a gun and somebody else passes away . . . And it’s not only taking the life of someone we may know, but it’s taking their family that’s left with it, that has to burden that pain of having a lost one and having to go through a gravesite to actually visit them.” Amos-Ross, who was among the 100-odd people who visited Lecent’s grave on her birthday and will be attending today’s memorial, said he remembers his niece as a “beautiful person, a gifted person,” and, when she was younger, as a chubbycheeked kid who always wanted to learn. “When I go back and remember her, I remember her . . . just reading her books and sitting down in my living room and saying, ‘Uncle Troy, can you teach me some more? Can we read books? Can we put on some worksheets?’ ” Amos-Ross said.
Lecent’s desire and aptitude for learning carried on into her teen years, too. Family friend and lawyer Luc Leclair told the Star Lecent “was a very vivacious and interested girl,” and that he had “no doubt she would have become a lawyer because she spoke well and she was bright.”
And at Greenholme Junior Middle School, where Lecent had finished Grade 8 just two weeks before she died, teacher Nigel Barriffe described her as a leader both inside and outside the classroom, a mature student who stayed out of typical teenage drama and was captain of the girls’ volleyball team.
“I can’t tell you what a really, really great human being this young woman was,” said Barriffe, who taught Lecent in Grade 7 and coached volleyball. “We were so looking forward to her growing up and graduating . . . It is such a cruel waste.”
And so, today, Lecent’s friends and family will gather at the local food bank.
There will be a barbecue, a memorial march and a vigil to celebrate the brilliant, all-too-short life of Lecent Ross, and mourn the exact day a year ago their daughter, granddaughter, sister, niece and friend was stolen away from them because of a single bullet.
“I just want her memory to live on forever,” Jasquith said, as her two younger children played in the backyard. “I’m trying my best to do that. I’m going to get involved in political events. . . I know I don’t have much education in that field, but I’m willing to try and I’m willing to learn.”
“Everybody, the community, we the people, everybody has to put down their feet. . . There has to be a change in this gun violence.”
About three months before she died, Lecent went to get an ear piercing and took her mother and Donald Beckles’ daughter along for the event.
“She got (it) in a weekend, in like April, I remember,” Jasquith recalled. “(Beckles’ daughter)’s telling her, ‘You’re crazy, you want to do that piercing?’ She’s like, ‘Yeah, I want to do it.’ . . . I said, ‘OK, you want to do it, remember, it’s going to hurt. I don’t have any of those piercings.’
“She goes, ‘You were young once.’ ” With files from Wendy Gillis