Bloody beginning to 2017 in Toronto

Around the corner from my home the other afternoon, broad daylight, there’s a male body lying in the open.

I walk by within minutes of Toronto’s fifth murder, 2017. The police haven’t even arrived yet.

That was Anastasios Leventis, 39, shot to death near George Brown College.

A couple of months ago, a 17-yearold boy I knew was gunned down on a Saturday morning in the JaneFinch area, outside a townhouse where he’d been visiting friends. Two men stepped out of a car and fired multiple times before fleeing in the same vehicle.

A few weeks earlier, I’d scolded Caheem “Clayshawn” Ramsuchit for trying to mooch a cigarette off me, saying there’s no way I was going to support a teenager’s nicotine habit. “Smoking will kill you.” He shrugged and grinned and walked me to my mother’s house, where the teenager attended backyard barbecues last summer. He was homicide No. 60. In another apartment where I previously lived, a few blocks away, a man down the hall stabbed to death with a screwdriver. My place broken into three times.

Maybe I live in a dangerous neighbourhood, encompassing Moss Park, a long stretch of flophouses and multiple shelters. Statistics bear that out, with the area secondhighest for assault rates in Toronto, first per capita in drug crime charges. The city’s first homicide this year occurred outside a variety store up the street, “penetrating gunshot wound to the chest” according to the police release. Across the street, the proprietor of another convenience store was slain — was it last year or the year before? They’re all starting to run together.

These are the streets where I live. But the down-and-out were here first, before the area started edging toward gentrification, at least around the edges and spit-ugly, those condo developments.

Everybody has to be somewhere, including those who are turned out from their overnight dossing accommodation during daytime hours and have nowhere to go, the homeless congregating on corners with the clearly mentally ill and a steadily increasing number of men who I suspect are recent immigrants or refugees, somehow fallen through the cracks of settlement and integration services. Fights break out frequently.

While I sometimes grow weary of the endless panhandling and the occasional physical accosting, this is my normal.

Except murder should never become anybody’s normal.

Perhaps I’m just acquainted with some of the wrong sorts of people, though detectives haven’t indicated that Clayshawn — who was obviously targeted — had been running with a guns ‘n’ gang crowd and his friends have insisted to me that was not the case. Unsolved. Leventis, as the Star’s Peter Edwards reported Thursday, was the brother of Mihale Leventis, awaiting trial in Montreal as part of a massive cocaine trafficking bust. So that raises obvious inferences about last Monday’s downtown murder.

I’m beginning to think that six degrees of separation — or four or three or two — is all that distances us, certainly me, from lethal violence. The murder roll thus far, for 2017: Anthony Earl Smith, 41. Shot. Dylan Gill, 24. Shot. Victor Ogundipe, 41. Died from injuries inflicted in an “altercation” with another inmate at Toronto South Detention Centre. Ali Rizeig, 18. Shot. Anastasios Leventis, 39. Shot. Dameion McFarland, 35. Shot.

The new year has come in like a lion. And where 2016 left off. There were 73 homicides in the city last year, 40 of them from bullets flying — way up from 26 in 2015 and worst toll of the gun in a decade. Shooting occurrences in 2016: 407. Shooting occurrences in 2015: 288. Shooting occurrences this for January: 23, which is actually significantly lower than last January.

Since Toronto’s infamous “Year of the Gun” — 52 bang-bang murders in 2005 — the gun deaths had actually been falling and remains, still, far below the gun carnage in similar sized American cities. Do you take solace in that fact? I don’t.

I cast my mind back to all the dying I’ve chronicled over the decades as a reporter — the murders, the accidents, the wars, the refugee camps, the natural disasters, the terrorist attacks, the children starved and beaten by their parents. The direct damage and the collateral damage.

But a slain man at my feet, blood pooling, around the corner from my home; a boy riddled by bullets — homicide brought too close to home. My normal. The abnormal normal now for too many residents in Toronto.

Even if the rest of you never take much notice. Rosie DiManno usually appears Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.