Disturbing eyewitness video shows deadly shooting at Toronto high school; police ID teen suspect
Toronto police have taken the unusual step of identifying the young suspect in a fatal Scarborough school shooting as an apparent eyewitness video emerged online, showing how the violence escalated in a schoolyard full of students.
Classes had ended at Woburn Collegiate Institute on Monday afternoon just moments before the shooting that left one teen dead, another injured and a third wanted for murder. Toronto police obtained a judge's permission to identify the 17-year-old suspect publicly on Wednesday.
Many students had stopped to watch what appeared to be an altercation in the parking lot, according to the video that captured how excited jeering turned to horrified screams amid the gunfire. The video, and the traumatic unfolding of events it shows, comes as no surprise to longtime community advocates and researchers alarmed by increasing teen violence, young people's desensitization to it and the lack of co-ordinated action by governments to prevent it.
Violence has become normalized in some communities," said Louis March, founder of the Zero Gun Violence Movement, who can list off countless other cases involving teens, often also caught on video.
It's a regular occurrence," he said. The kids have become immune to the tragedy that's taking place in front of their own eyes."
The video, which a police spokesperson said Wednesday investigators are aware of and trying to authenticate, has been circulating on social media platforms since the shooting, including on a Toronto-based Reddit community, where it was viewed by the Star.
The short, blurry clip shows an increasingly regular violent outburst that is nonetheless rarely seen widely in Canada. It starts suddenly, showing the outside of Woburn C.I. next to a school parking lot on Ellesmere Road. As the video continues, a person in a lighter-coloured sweatsuit can be seen backing away from at least three others in dark clothing as shouting erupts. The four individuals appear to be in some kind of altercation.
At least 12 young people can be seen in the 43-second video, some watching the incident unfold, while others make their way to parked cars or away from the school.
A voice from behind the camera is laughing as she follows the shouting teens.
Then chaos: three gunshots ring out as the narrator and others scream. The camera person then races towards a figure on the ground, others already bending over them before the video ends abruptly.
Earlier, police confirmed 18-year-old Jefferson Peter Shardeley Guerrier, a graduate of Lester B. Pearson C.I., had been killed by gunfire.
It's not clear who is who in the video.
A 15-year-old - who has not been identified but who the school said in a letter home Tuesday was a Woburn student - was also shot but is in stable condition.
On Wednesday afternoon, police released the name of a wanted person, 17-year-old Mustafa Kadhem, along with his photo, saying a court had granted them the ability to broadcast that information despite provisions of the Youth Criminal Justice Act the would normally bar the publication of a young suspect's identity.
Kadhem is wanted for second-degree murder; police say he is considered armed and dangerous.
Police were first called to the high school shortly after classes ended - just before 3:30 p.m. - on Halloween, sending students remaining inside the school into lockdown and leaving parents and guardians anxiously awaiting news as heavily-armed police surrounded the school.
The day after the shooting, local school trustee Zakir Patel told the Star many students were absent from class.
In a letter to caregivers and students Wednesday, TDSB board chair Alexander Brown and director of education Colleen Russell-Rawlins lamented the loss of life in a place where safety is expected, saying it should never happen to a family or school community"
Incidents like this show us that more can - and needs to - be done to eliminate gun violence in our city and in our school neighbourhoods," the letter says.
It called for urgent" collective action from all levels of government after the board wrote to all leaders asking for a collective response to growing concerns about student wellness, including increased and sustained funding for youth programs and supports.
We remain open to a more co-ordinated efforts from all partners," the letter says.
Toronto Metropolitan University associate dean Annette Bailey, who specializes in trauma and violence as part of the Daphne Cockwell School of Nursing, echoed the concerns about these events become normalized for some youth.
I would advise people to think of the shooter and what caused this person to pick up the gun, and how does the mountain of trauma that they live through every day impact their actions," she said. I want people to think about not just that moment in time, but the long-term impact on all the witnesses and the shooter if they come out of this alive. If we only centre on a video, then we miss the broad understanding of gun violence."
She continued: And by missing that, we miss the opportunity to create change and do thorough trauma assessments in marginalized communities. We will miss the opportunity to effectively address the root causes of gun violence. We will miss the opportunity to keep our young people alive."
When it comes to solutions, Bailey said there isn't enough time spent listening to young people and their communities.
We're sitting around at the boardroom table, we're coming up with strategies like getting more police on the street," she said. But I bet if you talked to communities, the response to gun violence would be very different. It would be community-oriented, it would be trauma-informed, culturally relevant mental health care."
March said different levels of governments and agencies spend too much time pointing fingers at each other instead of coming up with a co-ordinated response. Clearly, he said, the approaches taken to date are not working.
You can't stop the violence, it's already set in motion years ago," he said, unless we change fundamentally how we respond to it."
With files from Janiece Campbell
Jennifer Pagliaro is a Toronto-based crime reporter for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @jpags