When the bullet is just the beginning
Survivors of hundreds of Toronto shootings find the life that was spared has been changed forever
When a bullet tore into his chest, Carlton Cohen called his mom before he called 911.
Cohen, then 33, had been watching the 2008 U.S. presidential election on TV when someone knocked on the door of his apartment in the city’s Moss Park area for the second time that night.
When Cohen asked who was there, the shooter opened fire.
Three bullets ripped through the door, one of them piercing his left side.
“I said, ‘Mom, I’m shot.’ And she just began to scream . . . and after, she couldn’t cry, she began to moan,” Cohen said.
He assured her he’d be OK, then called 911. Rushed to Toronto’s St. Michael’s Hospital, he remembers a nurse saying two things before he lost consciousness.
“She said, ‘The bullet is travelling.’ I didn’t know that bullets could travel in you,” Cohen recalled. “And after, she said, ‘He’s dying, we’re losing him.’ ”
He begged God for a second chance before passing out.
At least 682 people have been shot in Toronto during the past four and a half years (as of June 20), according to Toronto police statistics. Most of them won’t die; 91 per cent of shooting victims from 2013 to mid-2017 have survived their injuries.
Although they emerge with their lives, rarely do survivors of shootings walk away without scars, both physical and emotional.
And the impact doesn’t just hurt the victim — like the epicentre of an earthquake, the shock wave blasts outwards, washing over friends, family and community.
To talk about shooting victims is to talk about loss, said Lindsay Upton, a program manager at Victim Services Toronto, which provides support for victims and witnesses of traumatic incidents and their families. Upton has worked for the agency for nearly 14 years.
“When someone is shot, not only are their bones shattered by the bullet . . . their complete lives are shattered, and there’s such an incredible sense of loss,” Upton said. “There’s an ongoing psychological injury.”
“It’s similar to losing a loved one because the family’s grieving the life they once knew.”
David Taylor, 22, knows this all too well.
It was April 14, 2017 — Good Friday — and he and his younger brother were at home getting ready to join their parents and other siblings at church when two Toronto police detectives knocked on the door.
“(The detectives asked), ‘Are you the brother of Samuel Taylor?’ And instantly I’m thinking, ‘What the hell did Sam do?’ Because we don’t get in trouble, but . . . when two detectives come to your door, (you think) he probably did something,” Taylor said.
“And they’re like, ‘No, he’s been shot.’ ”
Sam, 25, had actually been shot hours before, in what police suspect was a targeted attack, as he was fixing his car with a friend on the side of the road at Grenoble Dr. and Vendome Place, in the Don Valley Pkwy. and Eglinton Ave. E. area.
Security footage shows two men approaching him around 10 p.m. on April 13 and shooting him multiple times before fleeing in separate vehicles. He was rushed to a trauma centre in critical condition.
Two months and four surgeries later, Sam, who didn’t want to comment for this story but was OK with his brother speaking on his behalf, continues to recover from his injuries.
He has nightmares about the shooting, and his left leg and right shoulder, which were badly damaged, have yet to regain full mobility.
His goal to become certified as a heating, refrigeration and air conditioning technician — he’d completed Centennial College’s training program and had already paid for the exam — has been put on hold, and with it, his family’s sense of middleclass, quiet, suburban normalcy.
The family was hit hard financially, as both parents took time off work to visit and care for Sam, and expenses — car payments, phone bills, the brace Sam needed for his left leg — began to pile up. They turned to GoFundMe to help make ends meet. And between juggling 12-hour days at the hospital, driving to and from appointments, going back to work and school, other things were cut back, too.
One thing that’s increased, though, is a sense of worry — a fear that what they all thought only happened to other people on the news or crime dramas could happen to them not only once, but possibly again.
“One time, my older brother, he went to work with my car and whatnot . . . I’m watching for my car to come home, he’s not picking up his phone, he’s not answering, and instantly I’m thinking, ‘Something happened,’ ” Taylor said, adding that, in the end, his brother’s phone had just run out of power.
“You start to think the worst now . . . I’ll be walking down the street at night to where I parked my car and I’m looking around because I’m trying to not have it happen to me, you know what I mean?
“As soon as I get inside, I lock my doors instantly (because I’m thinking) maybe somebody’s watching around just getting ready to jump me. You just have a heightened sense of, ‘Something bad might happen to you now.’ ”
The as-yet unidentified shooters are wanted for attempted murder. In a public appeal for information in May, Toronto police Det. Sgt. Jim Gotell said it was the fourth shooting in the neighbourhood in five months.
That the shooters are walking free doesn’t shake David Taylor nearly as much as the fact that, for several hours, no one in the family knew his brother was fighting for his life.
“He could have died and we never would have known,” Taylor said, shaking his head. “We were all sleeping that night . . . none of us were there. He could have just died.”
Although the Taylor family were strangers to gun violence and crime before Sam was shot, Cohen, back in 2008, was intimately familiar with it.
At the time, Cohen said, he’d been in “the game” — selling drugs, running on the street, partying — for more than a decade and, in that time, saw “a lot” of friends and acquaintances injured or killed. Among them was his best friend, 19-year-old basketball star Justin Shephard, the half-brother of former NBA star Jamaal Magloire, gunned down in 2001. And another close friend, Shawn “Juice” James, 31, shot dead in 2007.
But even with friends getting hurt or dying, Cohen said he still felt invincible until it happened to him and he spent two weeks in hospital, where doctors had to reattach his small and large intestines.
Like the Taylor family, Cohen’s family was on edge for months afterwards. He remembered one instance, a few weeks after he was released from hospital, when there was a knock on his mother’s door. Cohen said he and his mother hid behind the couch in fear, while his brother, hiding around a corner, used a broomstick to block the door’s peephole and demanded the person identify themselves.
“It destroys families,” Cohen said. “You’re home and the door knocks and you don’t know who it is, you fear, is it your time? . . . There’s no peace. You’re there watching TV, (but) still, your mind’s worrying, ‘Is someone going to come through your door?’ ”
For Cohen, peace finally came through faith. His mother and her pastor held a prayer circle for him, which calmed his burning desire for revenge and gradually eased his fear. A knock on the door doesn’t bother him anymore, and he’s even forgiven his shooter, who’s never been charged. His brush with death, he said, was the push he needed to finally leave “the game”; he’s since earned a college diploma for addiction and community service work, and spends his time trying to break Toronto youth out of the cycle of crime and violence.
The only remnant of his old life is the scar running from the base of his sternum to below his belly button, where surgeons cut him open nine years ago, and two roughly nickelsized scars where the bullet entered his body and then left it.
“I don’t really think about it anymore, that’s my past,” Cohen said. “But every year, on that date, there’s a feeling that comes over me . . . like, ‘Wow. I almost died. This is the day I almost died.’ ”
For the Taylor family, the trauma is still fresh.
According to David, Sam hasn’t really spoken to his family about what happened, nor has anyone really asked him about it, either.
“You think about asking certain things, and then I see this guy, he was in the first stages of rehab with his physiotherapist and he’s trying to move his left leg or whatever, and then he just broke down and started crying because his left leg, doing simple things he used to do, it just doesn’t move like it used to,” Taylor said.
“It was hard for him, and I was like, ‘You know what? He doesn’t need this stress right now. We can leave this stuff for after.’ ”
“Are you the brother of Samuel Taylor?’ And instantly I’m thinking, ‘What the hell did Sam do?’ Because we don’t get in trouble, but . . . when two detectives come to your door, (you think) he probably did something.” DAVID TAYLOR ON THE NIGHT POLICE TOLD HIM HIS BROTHER SAMUEL HAD BEEN SHOT