Family lived in terror, questioned their safety
Still, even as Zameer, Shaikh and Hasan spoke to the Star of their relief, they stressed their regret for what happened that night. When Zameer testified earlier this month, he wept asking the Northrup family for forgiveness; on Monday, he repeated the thought: “I can’t stop thinking about them, about the kids especially.”
Just 24 hours earlier, the trio was inside courtroom 4-9 at the Superior Court of Justice, bracing for the verdict. It had already been a rollercoaster few days as the couple, both 34, waited for the jury to grapple with the complex decision before them.
Finally, “when I heard the jury say ‘not guilty,’ I was like — I couldn’t believe it, I couldn’t believe it that there are people who believe in our truth,” Shaikh said.
Late after Canada Day in 2021, she was eight-and-a-half months pregnant and seated in the passenger seat next to her husband when they were approached in the parking garage by two people they believed to be thugs. Their two-year-old son (he’s now five) was seated in the back seat.
It was only after Zameer had driven away — to flee — and their BMW was rammed by an unmarked van that they were told he had run over a plainclothes police officer. Zameer was arrested. He went to jail. Their lives came crashing down.
Zameer and Shaikh had arrived in Canada in January 2019, following his sister, Saima Zamir, who had moved to the GTA a few years earlier.
Born in Pakistan, Zameer came to Canada as a permanent resident under the federal skilled worker program. After working several part-time jobs, including driving for Uber and Lyft, he landed work in his chosen field, accounting. At the time of his arrest, he was flourishing in the accounting department of a property management company.
“Umar has done well here, considering the backlog of work that he handled independently,” his manager wrote in a January 2021 performance review.
He was fired from that position after his arrest, but has since opened his own accounting firm.
He said some of his darkest days came while locked up in the Toronto South Detention Centre — he was there when Shaikh gave birth to the baby, a daughter, she was carrying that Canada Day evening.
“She was all alone in the hospital when she was delivering,” he told the Star as tears welled up in Shaikh’s eyes.
From that, “I don’t know if I can ever — we can ever — move on,” he said.
From the start, the prosecution’s case that Zameer had intentionally killed Northrup — the standard for him to be convicted of murder — was weak.
At Zameer’s bail hearing in September 2021, the judge in charge said so repeatedly: The idea that a man with no criminal record, out with his pregnant wife and toddler, would suddenly decide to intentionally kill Northrup by running him over, “runs contrary to logic and common sense,” she wrote.
To support Zameer’s bail application, his family “moved heaven and earth” to transfer their assets — “substantially all of our collective worth,” his sister Zamir wrote in an affidavit — into Canada. They were successful — but still, there was the stigma, including from Premier Doug Ford, who slammed the judge’s decision despite not knowing her reasons. (A court-ordered publication ban on the reasons behind her decision ended Sunday, after the verdict.)
Amid all this, the couple, who moved in with Zameer’s sister and her children, lived in terror and questioned whether it was safe to remain in Canada — although leaving was not an option. Zameer had to surrender his passport and lived under house arrest where the extended family lived like prisoners.
“We stopped going out of the house,” he recalled. “We were scared ... (of ) every person who was walking out in front of our house.” They would peer out the windows and question why a car was driving by slowly; they installed four surveillance cameras on the exterior and kept the TV on all the time for light to “see if anyone is going to come in and do something.”
At the same time, with the trial looming, they said they were unable to address the public portrayal of Zameer as a monster who had deliberately killed a cop.
“We had lost hope many times,” Shaikh said.
In truth, Zameer said, he admires police; he repeated a story he told when he testified, about his now five-year-old son wants to be a police officer when he grows up.
Hasan recalled on Monday that one of the first questions Zameer asked him when they first met at the Toronto South Detention Centre was not, “How can I get bail?” or “How can you fight this case?” but instead: “Do you know how the family of that poor officer are doing?”
“None of these two families will ever be the same,” Hasan said. “There are no winners here. But it wouldn’t have done our country one bit of good to send to jail an innocent man, an innocent man who happens to be a very good person also.”
Nor is Zameer bitter toward the officer who punched him in the face while he was handcuffed following the guns-drawn takedown at the parking garage exit.
“I forgot about the punch when I saw the blood on the car,” he said. (Asked about the possibility of any future litigation his client might consider “to right certain wrongs that occurred in this case,” Hasan said the thought was premature.)
After court on Sunday, Zameer was able to literally cut off the electronic monitoring ankle bracelet he’s been wearing — and paying for.
He and Shaikh picked up their three children at a friend’s house — for the entire lives of his two youngest daughters, he’d had a prosecution hanging over his head.
“This was the first time I wasn’t thinking anything else other than hugging,” he said, describing giving his son — who was in the car that evening — a particularly tight squeeze.
“I wasn’t thinking, ‘What will happen?’ I hugged them for so long.”
During the month-long trial, Zameer and Shaikh said they’d told their children their father was busy working on “a project.”
On Sunday, they were able to tell them: “Bubba’s project went well.”