No T.O. neighbourhood immune to violence
The horror was genuine and so was the dismay.
A man murdered right here, on a late spring night, shattering the sense of calm that apparently is enjoyed by the residents and shopkeepers around one of Toronto’s most chichi neighbourhoods.
Bay St. and Yorkville Ave., where 37-year-old Matthew Staikos, CEO of a successful technology company that provides a messaging platform for group chats, was shot to death on May 29 in what police described as an “unprovoked attack on a defenceless’’ guy just strolling along.
What witnesses recounted, however, made it sound like an execution, the gunman firing at Staikos from close range, then jumping into a silver Mercedes that sped away southbound.
Detectives can’t say or don’t know if the victim had been targeted, whether he might have been acquainted with the shooter who took his life, plunging family and friends into shock and grief.
“There was no precipitating event,” said Det. Omar Khan.
But just beneath the heartfelt distress of some locals who commented to the media afterwards, there was also a whiff of indignation — not over the murder, exactly, but that it should have occurred in so pleasant and tony a milieu. As if such low-life street violence is an interloper thereabouts. They couldn’t have imagined such a thing.
Well, people have short memories because it has happened thereabouts and in the near vicinity before. A 29-yearold doctor battered to death by two men in the underground parking garage of her highrise Bay St. apartment building, stealing $50 from her purse. The Just Desserts murder of a 23-year-old hairdresser only a little ways north during an armed robbery. Those are only a couple of pointless slayings that come immediately to mind.
On May 23, not that far away in the Annex, Abbegail Elliott was stabbed to death in an apartment.
Where do we erect these imaginary fences, corralling off neighbourhoods as safer than others, less inclined to bloodshed than others, as if dwellers there are living in a different city, a different country, and the malevolent don’t get a visa.
There’s no such thing in Toronto, not a single area of this city that hasn’t experienced violence and the jolt of murder.
But we pay more attention, it seems, react with greater outrage, when the victims are … what? Law-abiding citizens who didn’t bring the savagery upon themselves, because of the people they might have known, the places they frequented, the troubled neighbourhoods where they resided.
The city shivered right down to its toes when billionaire philanthropists Barry and Honey Sherman were found dead inside their North Toronto home in what police initially suggested (via leaks) had been a murder-suicide — until findings by a second, independent autopsy, arranged by the family, pointed to a double homicide and detectives announced in January they were treating the deaths as that: Two suspicious deaths, two murders, targeted.
Tens of thousands of words in media coverage have since been devoted to the mystery, the homicides still unsolved.
A high-profile murder mystery is always compelling, of course, and the Shermans were publicly mourned by equally high-profile personages, right up to the prime minister of Canada.
Who mourns, to such attendant public grief, for Jaiden Jackson, captured on security video as he ran for his life into a parking garage, pursued by two gunmen on foot and a third in a car, firing at the 28-year-old relentlessly?
Or 21-year-old York U student Venojan Suthesan, gunned down at Lester B. Pearson Collegiate Institute not long after he’d completed his shift at a local restaurant, changing clothes at home before setting out for the gym.
Or 18-year-old Israel Edwards, shot and killed at Yonge-Dundas Square.
Eight murders in the brief span of 11 days.
All were among nine “May Murders” — six shot, two stabbed, one cause of death unknown, or at least not revealed yet by detectives.
That was Rhoderie Estrada, a 41-year-old nurse and mother, found unresponsive in the bedroom of her home near Pape Ave., apparently discovered by her husband when he returned from work.
That murder did resonate for more than a day, more than a fleeting news broadcast, because the alleged killer had climbed into her house through a side window. Yostin Murillo, who had been living in — and been kicked out of — Toronto shelters was quickly arrested, charged with firstdegree murder. A second suspect, David Beak, 23, also of no fixed address, was arrested on Friday and charged with firstdegree murder as well.
Estrada did not know her killer, said lead homicide investigator Det.-Sgt. Mike Carbone.
Queried about the murder again on Friday, Carbone emphasized to the Star that he never said the killing was “random.”
“I can’t tell you why that house was targeted. I have an idea but I can’t say.”
Carbone well understands why the Estrada murder struck fear into the heart of city dwellers. He came in through the window. Could have been anybody slain in the presumed sanctuary of their home.
“It’s not something you expect to happen when you’re home reading a book or watching TV.”
But of course other innocents have been killed in their homes, even children struck by bullets that were not intended for them.
Oh, but those aren’t your safe neighbourhoods, are they?
Those many Black mothers, grieving for their dead Black sons, exist in an alternate universe.
They’re in Jane-Finch and Regent Park and the public housing canyons of St. Jamestown … Rexdale … Lawrence Heights … Danzig … and my own criminally plagued ’hood, Moss Park.
I know plenty of homicide cops and they are the top drawer of policing. I don’t believe they rank victims by tier of importance, categorizing any one loss of life greater than another. Toronto police may have failed the Gay Village community over the years when a serial killer was allegedly preying on gay men. But Project Houston was unable to find a link between the three men originally reported missing until Project Prism began cracking open the cases of the disappeared last summer and Bruce McArthur was ultimately charged with the murder of two males that eventually became eight men.
On Saturday, the eve of Portugal Day in Toronto, 19-year-old Aaron Rankine-Wright was both struck by an SUV and then stabbed to death in a Little Portugal laneway as he was pedalling to work, a 17year-old charged with firstdegree murder with police seeking two other suspects. Homicide No. 39 in 2018. A great many murders in less than six months, differing in how they were committed, though guns are the primary common denominator.
The notorious Year of the Gun, back in 2005, hit an apogee of murders. But if there was any comfort in that shooting spree, it was that gangs were mostly preying on each other. It was their private little world of mayhem.
There seems nothing to connect the homicides this year, or not that police have been able to establish, says Insp. Bryan Bott, head of homicide.
“Are some of them related? Not that we’ve been able to determine. Is that good news or bad news? I guess you can spin it either way. Of course it’s always bad news when someone is murdered.”
Year to date: 175 shootings, compared to 149 at the same point in 2017, 164 in 2016.
What’s most worrisome is that, in the May murder frenzy, only two of the homicides have been solved.
It’s harder, criminal experts say, to solve homicides committed by guns. The forensics provide fewer clues.
Bott emphasizes that if the 10 deaths that resulted from the April van rampage on north Yonge St. are stripped out of the stats, Toronto’s murder rate is close to “normal” for 2018.
“The murder rate has been fairly consistent in the last eight to 10 years. And we always see a flurry of such events when the weather gets warmer.’’
The clearance rate on homicides this year — the solve figure — is at 54 per cent.
Toronto is still, relatively speaking, a safe city compared to like-sized metropolises in the U.S. We’re not so enthralled by guns. Most of us do not have them easy at hand.
But most of us aren’t doing the murdering either.
And most of us, the rest of us, especially those so fortunately buffered from the violence, have empathy that runs about a millimetre deep.
Rosie DiManno is a columnist based in Toronto covering sports and current affairs. Follow her on Twitter: @rdimanno.