Reporting on the Yonge St. rampage
When tragedy struck, the Star’s reporters came together to tell the story
The first indication the Star got that all was not well in North York on Monday was a tweet from the Toronto Police Operations Centre: “Collision, numerous pedestrians have been struck by a white van on Yonge St and Finch area. further when I get more.”
It was 1:30 p.m. and reporter Jenna Moon was monitoring the Toronto police twitter account. As soon as she saw the tweet, she says, she knew this was big and immediately ran to alert her supervisor, Ed Tubb, an assignment editor on the Star’s breaking news team.
Tubb asked Moon to write a short article with what little information she had. While she did that, Patrick Ho, the rewrite editor on the digital team, began monitoring breaking news channels for the latest information, while the Star’s team of web editors prepared to push breaking news alerts on all of the Star’s digital platforms.
“They were all on the story within 30 seconds of seeing that tweet — there was a lot of controlled yelling in the newsroom,” Tubb recalled.
Moon’s first story on the incident explaining that police said there were between eight and 10 pedestrians struck by a white van was posted online at 1:41 p.m. Tubb, fellow assignment editor Amber Shortt and their manager, breaking news/ enterprise editor Amit Shilton, dispatched reporters Victoria Gibson and Tamar Harris to the scene.
“It’s tough in the first hour, when we don’t know yet the extent of what’s happened. The first thing is to get reporters on the scene fast,” Tubb said.
In addition to those in the Star newsroom, Metroland and StarMetro reporters responded. Metroland’s Andrew Palamarchuk and Aaron D’Andrea were among the first reporters on scene. One shaken eyewitness who said he briefly followed the van told Palamarchuk: “This is not an accident.”
“You look back now and yes, it’s pretty obvious,” said Patrick Ho, who kept the breaking news story up-to-date online Monday. “But amid the first minutes of a developing story, we need to make sure. For all we know, without verification, it could have been a case of medical distress.”
At the south end of the 2.2kilometre stretch of Yonge that had been cordoned off by police, Gibson and Harris interviewed witnesses and police officers, sending their files back to the Star and posting what they were learning on social media.
Star reporters Jesse McLean and Moira Welsh also went to the scene, walking south from Finch on side streets and behind buildings on Yonge, interviewing witnesses who were in shops and restaurants when the rampage began. Welsh spoke to a woman who worked in a restaurant close to Finch who gave her an eyewitness account of a young woman lying on the sidewalk with two men performing CPR on her. Star photographers René Johnston, Steve Russell and Lucas Oleniuk were dispatched to different areas of the scene. Coincidentally, Johnston knew that area of North York well because his grandfather used to live close by. Johnston raced on foot toward North York City Centre, which is just north of Mel Lastman Square, where according to initial reports several people had been hit. Sadly, this proved to be true.
Yonge St. had been closed to traffic, so in order to get close, Johnston entered the area from the west via Beecroft Road, which runs parallel to Yonge, and ran east to the Starbucks on the northeast corner of the square. From there, at 2:23 p.m., he snapped a photo of firefighters and police placing an orange tarp over the body of a victim. A single shoe and some items of clothing rest in the foreground. The picture ran as main art on the front page the next day.
Kathy English, the Star’s public editor, said that it is imperative the Star gets it right, even when news is breaking fast.
“In any breaking news situation, so much misinformation circulates,” English said. “There was a lot of speculation about terrorism. These are the kinds of situations where we have the opportunity to show the role of real news. We take that responsibility very seriously — giving readers facts, not rumours.” As the team on the scene scrambled for information, the digital desk was in overdrive looking for photos on social media and keeping thestar.com and other platforms up-to-date. It was a difficult task given the abundance of unconfirmed information being reported on social media, and the fact that the number of dead and injured kept changing. “We did our best to comb through social media, particularly Twitter, to find photos we could use but that proved difficult,” said deputy digital editor Sabrina Melchiori. “An abundance of caution was necessary to avoid the spread of misinformation.”
Around 5:30 p.m., CBS News reported that sources had identified the suspect in the rampage as Alek Minassian, 25, of Richmond Hill. As soon as she heard this, the Star’s social media producer Evelyn Kwong searched LinkedIn, found a profile she thought could be Minassian’s and saved his photo.
“We had a LinkedIn account with a guy that said he went to Seneca but we didn’t have anybody who knew him who could confirm that his photo is him,” explained Shilton.
Reporter Harris was dispatched to Richmond Hill to see if she could locate Minassian’s home in an effort to confirm his identity. Meanwhile, crime reporter Wendy Gillis worked sources to confirm what CBS was reporting and that the photo from LinkedIn was in fact Minassian. Once it was confirmed, a breaking news alert email at 7:48 p.m. told Star readers that a police source had identified the suspect as Minassian.
In the evening, reporter Mitch Potter stitched together the main story, drawing in the work of 21 reporters.