Covering the Danforth Ave. mass shooting
Late-night reporting required quick action
This story is part of the Star’s trust initiative, where, every week, we take readers behind the scenes of our journalism.
Shortly after 10 p.m. last Sunday, July 22, Inori Roy, a reporter in the Star’s radio room, noticed a trickle of posts on Twitter about unconfirmed reports of gunfire on the Danforth.
Within minutes, the trickle became a deluge. She immediately called police, EMS and Toronto Fire Services, which told her they had received the first call at 10:04 p.m.
“The gravity of the situation really dawned on me when I heard the urgency in the voice of the paramedic I spoke to. He sounded like he was on the verge of panic, like there was as crisis,” Roy said. She ran over to the Star’s digital desk to alert editors, who instructed her to start writing a short story to be posted on thestar.com.
At the same time, Star photographer Richard Lautens had just returned to his home near the Danforth after a vacation in cottage country, when his two kids, who had gone out for dinner, came running in. They had just seen a string of police cars, sirens blaring, speeding down the Danforth.
Lautens grabbed his camera and started running. A few min- utes later, at around 10:10 p.m., he was at Alexander the Great Parkette at the corner of Logan and Danforth Aves., where he saw paramedics administering first aid to two people lying on the ground. “It was just mayhem everywhere,” Lautens said. “Nobody knew what was going on.”
He snapped pictures of bystanders looking on in shock, of police interviewing witnesses and of paramedics loading victims on gurneys into ambulances. Using his phone as an internet hot spot, he quickly emailed the newsroom a couple of photos that could run with the initial story, which went online at10:51p.m. It reported that a man dressed in black had opened fire on the Danforth, injuring multiple people.
As the scale of the tragedy started to become clear, news editor Jason Paul, who was overseeing production at the Star that night, began making a plan to get reporters on the ground.
“As more eyewitness accounts came in, we wanted to be sensitive knowing that lives had been lost and others injured. We wanted to help readers understand what was happening but at the same time knowing this was a devastating situation for so many people,” Paul said.
He called breaking news editor Amit Shilton to discuss the unfolding situation. Shilton then started calling reporters who lived in the area of the shooting to see who could get to the scene and interview witnesses.
One of those reporters was David Rider, the Star’s city hall bureau chief, who was out walking his dog when he heard sirens and saw a police command vehicle heading north on Carlaw Ave. toward the Danforth. Shortly before midnight, Rider stationed himself outside the police cordon at that intersection and started interviewing people leaving the scene.
Shilton also reached Wendy Gillis, the Star’s crime reporter, who hopped in a cab and rushed to the other end of the cordon at Danforth and Broadview Ave. where she interviewed several witnesses. One of the first people she stopped on the street was an employee of the Second Cup near Chester subway station that had been a target of the gunman. The employee provided a detailed description of the shooter and recounted a shocking story of watching him fire his gun at the shop.
Back in the newsroom, digital producers Tanis Fowler and Priya Ramanujam kept the online news file updated throughout the night and started a liveblog, which pulled in tweets from reporters on the scene and Roy in the radio room.
Shortly before 12:30 a.m., Gillis learned — thanks to a timely text message from a colleague — that Police Chief Mark Saunders and Mayor John Tory would be holding a press conference in just a few minutes at Danforth and Logan Aves. Gillis was about a kilometre away so she sprinted as fast as she could, arriving just as the chief and the mayor stepped up to the microphones.
Jenna Moon, the overnight radio room reporter, was also dispatched to the scene to gather colour and interview witnesses. She later met up with Gillis before heading to St. Michael’s Hospital to check on the status of victims.
Columnist Rosie DiManno also went to the scene and spoke to witnesses for a story she filed early that morning.
Sunday night’s front-page editor, Anthony Collins, stayed all night to combine the individual journalists’ reports into a comprehensive story covering as many aspects of the shooting as possible.
“At that point, we were really leaning on the reporters to give us whatever kind of colour they could from the scene in order to take the story beyond a shorter police file, to really flesh out what happened,” said Paul, who also stayed at the Star throughout the night. “The goal was to set up a really great package — Rosie’s column and a thorough news story — that was available for readers in the morning.”