Random ambushes alarm police, disgust public
Fecal attacks on Torontonians weren’t remotely funny, but rather a public health risk
Number 2 — with a bucket.
Five poor mooks — thus far — who’ve had pails of feces dumped on their persons in recent days. “Liquefied fecal matter,” as the police release delicately put it.
The serial crap-slinger at first ambushed unsuspecting patrons at the University of Toronto’s Robarts Research Library and the Scott Library at York University. That was last Friday and Sunday afternoon, respectively. But on Monday the dungand-run hurled viscous kaka at a woman walking in the area of College Street and University Avenue, before fleeing. “Dropped the bucket after and ran,” says Const. Allyson Douglas-Cook.
The attacks appear random. None of the victims recognized their assailant.
“They don’t have any history or relationship with this person,” Douglas-Cook notes of the targets.
On Tuesday night, police arrested Samuel Opoku, 23, of Toronto. He’s charged with five counts of assault with a weapon and five counts of mischief.
The only maybe M.O. for the pooping K.O., according to investigators, is that the fecestosser has worn — not on all occasions — a yellow construction hard hat. Which could mean something or nothing. Until the last year, a yellow vest was just a yellow vest, until it was transformed into a political symbol, subsequently coopted by hard-right haters. Could be this bucket-’o-turds is simply trying to prevent splash-back from landing on his own head.
Is the excrement barrage a hate crime? On the social media tom-tom, that’s certainly the speculation, with claims all the victims were Asians. Douglas-Cook cautions against jumping to any conclusions. “That’s what’s out there on social media, but we have no (supporting) evidence at this time. What the motive might be is beyond us.”
Some of the students have had their books and laptops ruined. And it’s not merely a pain in the arse, the cleaningup and disinfecting. It’s a biohazard public health risk, with countless bacterial and parasitical possible outcomes from exposure to human feces, from cholera to hepatitis to shigella.
“We weren’t even certain it’s human feces,” Douglas-Cook continues. Although that appears now to have been established as fact, forensically.
Police were able to retrieve the bucket used in Monday’s attack, which is being tested for fingerprints and DNA. Which of course can only be matched to what’s already in the data bank.
Another working theory, Douglas-Cook says, is that the pick-and-hurl may be “connected to hazing or something like that.” Ritualistic horrors exacted from frosh-rushing and frat houses. Or the culprit is mentally ill, that one-sizefits-all fallback.
Nor is poo-pitching so rare a felonious phenomenon, as a check of news databases reveals. Just last month, a homeless man in L.A. pulled a woman out of her car near the Hollywood Walk of Fame, dragged her into the middle of the street and poured a pail of “hot” diarrhea over her head. “It was diarrhea, hot liquid,” the woman told NBC. “I was soaked, and it was coming off my eyelashes and into my eyes.”
A paramedic who attended at the scene observed: “It looked like the man was saving it up for a month.” Ewww. Any future victims hereabouts are being encouraged not to wash off immediately, so that forensics can take a good specimen gander. “Of course, we know that the first thing they want to do is get that stuff off them,” Douglas-Cook acknowledges.
But where would the culprit get his, uh, ammunition? The average person defecates about six pounds of waste a week. “The buckets seemed to be about half-full,” Douglas-Cook discloses.
Not on anybody’s bucket-list, surely. But honey-buckets, as the vessels were once called, back in the Middle Ages, before the invention of even ancient commodes. (Although ancient Romans had figured out flushing toilets centuries earlier, but Brits — who really do love their potty humour — were slow that way.) Because I’m now up to my ears in poop history, here’s the lesson for today: In medieval times, those same aforementioned Anglos and Saxons believed that the foul odour from chamber pots — wherein they did their business — could ward off moths. Thus they stored their clothes in smelly closets, surrounded by chamber pots. Gaterobes they were called, hence the term wardrobe.
At least the stuff they didn’t chuck out their windows for collection by the honey wagons for transport to cesspools. A comparatively high-paying job. The fellows tasked with this particular employment were known as “night men” — because they were permitted to work only under cover of darkness — or “gong farmers.” Cesspools, by the way, were also used for torture and drowning by excrement.
Fun factoid: While “muckrakers” were hired to clean up the roads of ordure, the streets of medieval England were still overrun with merde. The wellheeled hired servants to carry them across the mixed manure landscape. To avoid getting splattered by window-chucked waste, the servants would yell out: “CHAIR BELOW!” Whence came cheerio. You’re welcome. In the animal world, if you accept that humans aren’t animals, creatures often fling their feces as an expression of anger or warning. This would explain why, say, zoo denizens fling their turds at gawkers. You might do the same.
And I won’t even get into all the bewildering paraphilia — kinks ’n’ compulsions — from coprophilia (pleasure and sexual arousal) to coprophagia (eating it) to scatolia (smearing it.)
“Some people might think it’s funny but it’s not,” DouglasCook says.
“It’s alarming and disgusting in every way possible.”
So is this column, frankly.
“Some people might think it’s funny but it’s not. It’s alarming and disgusting in every way possible.”
CONST. ALLYSON DOUGLAS-COOK TORONTO POLICE SERVICE