‘It’s a huge loss for our community. It’s an even bigger loss for the city’
Fatal shooting of mentor, entrepreneur Sam Boakye leaves Jane-Finch mourning
Living in a Toronto Community Housing apartment near Jane Street and Grandravine Drive, a low-income pocket of the city, Kwadwo (Sam) Boakye knew he needed to defy the odds.
“Sometimes you feel like your options are limited just based on your demographic,” Boakye, then 23, told the Toronto Star in a 2014 article exploring deep divisions in the city — how neighbourhood disparities in housing, transit and employment hinder the course of a life.
Through quiet confidence and an entrepreneurial bent, Boakye not only burst through those limits to create his own path. He did everything he could to bring others with him.
“He really, really did care about the community, and making a difference,” said Agapi Gessesse, a friend who met Boakye at a leadership development program for youth created after the 2005 Summer of the Gun.
“I really think he made a conscious decision to do better, and be greater.”
Boakye was a new father, a longtime community mentor and an entrepreneur whose business was geared toward creating trade jobs for local youth.
He was gunned down just before 9 p.m. in a laneway in the area of Driftwood Avenue and Grandravine Drive. Shot multiple times, Boakye died at the scene. He was 30.
No arrests have been made and police have not provided any information about a motive for the killing, Toronto’s 58th homicide this year and the 28th fatal shooting. Community members fear Boakye was simply a victim of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
That place — Driftwood and Grandravine — is among the worst in the city for gun violence, according to recent Toronto police shooting data. Between 2004 and 2020, the intersection near the Yorkwoods Village TCHC community was the city’s fourth most common intersection for shootings, with 30 shootings that killed two people and injured 16 others.
That Boakye was gunned down in the very neighbourhood he was working to uplift has left the community reeling — grieving the loss of someone with undeniable potential, and deeply worried about the impact of a changemaker’s life being snuffed out.
“For him to get caught up in senseless gun violence, you know, I’m really worried about some of the youth around him that he’s supported,” said Kumsa Baker, who met Boakye through Out of the Box, a construction company Boakye helped establish that teaches life skills and employs racialized youth in the trades.
“It puts the fear in people — no one’s gonna want to work in these neighbourhoods anymore,” said Zya Brown, founder and executive director of Toronto’s Think 2wice, which supports incarcerated youth and victims of gun violence.
“This is bad, coming against the leaders that we need.”
Boakye’s community work began while he was still a student at Westview Centennial Secondary School. There, he mentored Grade 8 students and
helped them achieve their first high school credit through the Jane-Finch youth organization, Success Beyond Limits.
Young people “gravitated” toward him, said Mohamed Ahmed, a close friend and the coexecutive director of Success Beyond Limits. Supporting young people academically and socially came naturally to Boakye, who was both fun to be around and “wise beyond his years.”
“I think he knew how to connect with the ambitions we all have within ourselves,” Ahmed said, “and bring that to fruition.”
In 2011, Boakye was one of hundreds to apply to be part of the Youth Justice Education Program, an initiative for young African Canadian men with aspirations to affect change and “to do better than the communities that they were coming from,” according to Mobafa Baker, who was the program director.
Boakye, soft-spoken and the youngest of the group, was one of just eight accepted.
“When I met him I was taken aback by his humility,” Baker said.
The program saw the men travel all over Ontario, to the United States and even Ghana, where Boakye had roots, enabling a visit with his father, Baker said. Boakye was a peacemaker in the group — “Sam was always one of those gentlemen who would be focused on deescalating situations.”
Baker recalls Boakye’s intense joy when he later enrolled in classes at the University of Toronto; post-secondary education wasn’t something Boakye thought he’d ever do. Boakye once told him that, after high school, he’d wandered the nearby York University campus, trying and failing to figure out how to apply.
Boakye was also a youth justice worker with the African Canadian Legal Clinic, where he had a keen interest in helping youth who had criminal records find an alternative path.
“That was really a passion of his,” said Gessesse, now the executive director of CEE Centre for Young Black Professionals. “(He asked) ‘How can you engage young people in a meaningful way so that they wouldn’t get back into trouble?’”
For Boakye, the answer was creating economic opportunity through good jobs. First through Out of the Box then, more recently, through his construction business, Build and Builders Development Corp., Boakye realized calling the shots meant having the power to employ and train youth who might not get hired elsewhere.
“Out of the Box is just there to look out for young people, because we understand what it means not to be looked out for,” Boakye says in a short video posted to the organization’s website.
Two people he hired went on to start their own businesses. In social media posts, Boakye celebrated when a young person completed a training certificate or got a new job. He sometimes hired leaders from different fields to be guest speakers during staff training.
Boakye, too, was a powerful speaker, according to Brown, from Think 2wice. After hearing about Boakye’s company on the news, one of the inmates Brown worked with asked if Boakye could come to the jail to speak. She brought him to the Beaver Creek Institution, a federal prison near Gravenhurst, in 2019.
“When he spoke, everyone listened,” said Brown.
Boakye later played a key role in Think 2wice’s production “Dying to Live,” a play exploring the devastation of gun violence. Boakye was cast as a shooter in a story where two innocent people die as a result of neighbourhood gang rivalries. His performance was strong because he knew the social issues so intimately, Brown said.
The impact of Boakye’s tragic death is vast, Brown said in an interview.
Not only has the community lost an employer and a man who “put his heart and soul into the work that he does,” she worries it could discourage others from trying to make a difference in their community.
“We don’t need people to change and never look back again, because the rest our kids are there and they don’t have a role model that they can identify with. This is a serious blow for the community,” she said.
Also lost is the impact Boakye would have made in Toronto and beyond, said Ahmed, Boakye’s friend from Success Without Limits. Boakye was the kind of person who went beyond conversation to take action — “I think we need more of those types of people.”
“It’s a huge loss for our community,” Ahmed said. “It’s an even bigger loss for the city, because his work was just growing.”
Baker, the former director of the youth justice program, said rather than discourage those seeking to make a positive difference in their communities, he hopes Boakye’s death can motivate them. After all, Boakye did not let setbacks distract him from his big ambitions.
“There were many times when he could have easily shut down and walked away, but he refused to do that,” Baker said. “So to truly honour his legacy would not be to shut down, but to continue the fight.”