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An Eaton Centre Shooting Recap

A quick rundown of what we know about what happened last night.

By • Photos by Christopher Drost

Last night, at around 6:30, numerous witnesses heard several (perhaps as many as 15) gunshots while they were working or dining in Eaton Centre’s newly renovated food court. People left the mall right away, or otherwise remained inside locked storefronts until they could evacuate safely. Police spent several hours on the scene, shutting down traffic on Yonge, Queen, and Dundas streets until they could get the situation under control. About two and a half hours after the incident, police confirmed one death and seven injuries related to the crime. Police say the deceased, a 25-year-old man, appears to have been the target of the shooting. The other people who were hurt, officials believe, were merely unlucky.

The Eaton Centre is closed today as the police investigation continues. Possessions of shoppers and employees are reportedly locked inside. People who left their cars in the mall’s parking garages last night have not yet been able to retrieve them.

There is no word as to when the mall might reopen. Whoever pulled the trigger has not yet been arrested. Police officers had a working description of the suspect that they were circulating among themselves last night (see our liveblog for details), but so far the Toronto Police Service has said nothing officially about what the shooter (or shooters) might look like.

Above, a gallery of photos from last night. They’re in roughly chronological order.

Comments

  • Eroshan

    How can people be so illiterate, when they make stupid coments like unless they stop Muslin immigrants to the country this crap will continue

  • Anonymous

    Can we all agree that, whatever the Child Mayor’s faults, this shooting had nothing to do with Rob Ford being Mayor? Just as Jane Creba had absolutely nothing to do with David Miller being Mayor?

    Toronto has a seriously-screwed up problem where thugs (who are common to every city) treat downtown public spaces as their playspace (much less common). This will take much effort to resolve (I’m all for coating everything downtown in cameras, like London) but has little to do with who is Mayor.

    • Anonymous

      You’re all for wasting hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars of tax payer money on cameras with a notoriously low rate of catching criminals and a demonstrated inability to deter crime in the first place?

      • Anonymous

        Yes. What can I say, I like the London model. You raise some good points, but it’s an emotional issue for me.

        • Anonymous

          Security theatre is expensive and doesn’t solve any problems. I’d rather see cops on the streets – cops we’re already paying for – than cameras that don’t work.

          • Anonymous

            Fair enough. If you could get the cops out of their cruisers and from behind their desks to patrol on foot in Toronto’s most important public spaces I agree it would be a terrific and much-needed step. Cameras are just a backup plan since we both know that will never happen.

    • Michael DiFrancesco

      Toronto has a seriously-screwed up problem where thugs (who are common to every city) treat downtown public spaces as their playspace (much less common).

      The last time this type of incident happened in Toronto (broad daylight downtown gang fight) was the Jane Creba incident, correct? Because that was 2005. Seven years ago. I’d say two downtown shootings of this calibre in seven years is a long way from being a seriously screwed-up problem.

      I understand and sympathize with the fact that it’s an emotional issue. But it’s precisely because it’s an emotional issue that hyperbole has to be avoided. It doesn’t help anyone.

      • Anonymous

        It doesn’t help anyone to avoid facts either by pretending that there has not been a murder downtown since Jane Creba.

        I’m responding to this map.

        http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/06/03/eaton-centre-shooting-toronto/#2

        A comparable map of, say, Manhattan or Chicago would be a near desert in the CBD/tourist areas. (If I am wrong please advise but a quick check of Compstat shows that the two precincts for Midtown Manhattan have recorded one murder in 2012, in a “downtown” area much larger than Toronto’s). Chicago has ten times the numbers of murders as Toronto, but there has not been a single murder within the “loop” in 2012. (http://homicides.redeyechicago.com/date/2012/05/)

        You expect to see incidents in low-income areas but what’s with our downtown lighting up like a Christmas tree?

        • Michael DiFrancesco

          Honestly? I don’t know. I have no idea of the demographic differences between The Loop in Chicago and downtown Toronto. I’d be willing to wager that Toronto’s downtown likely skews younger and poorer than Chicago’s (both of which would contribute to a higher likelihood of homicide), but I simply don’t have that information.

          I see your point, and it’s valid, but given the choice, I’ll take 1/10th the murder rate of Chicago for a more dispersed crime map. That’s by far the more important number. I don’t care very much about where people are getting killed; just that fewer are being killed.

          • Anonymous

            No way – Toronto’s downtown is relatively wealthy compared to other parts of town (see http://www.toronto.ca/demographics/atlas/hoods_lowincomefamilies.pdf) just like Chicago and Manhattan and other big cities. You’re missing my entire point, which is that criminals feel free to engage in dangerous acts and homicides in the core public spaces of Toronto in a manner totally inconsistent with the area’s thriving and successful nature; a pattern very different than in other cities.

            While I do care about the number of people getting killed I care very much where they get killed. Cities are not flat plateaus — they have hearts and skylines and public spaces that are disproportionately symbolic of the city as a whole. Business and tourism suffer if the most popular and public spaces become criminal domains. This is Toronto’s problem.

          • Michael DiFrancesco

            Actually, that demographic info you just linked to is perfect: the lower-income areas of downtown line up exactly to the higher-crime areas on the National Post infographic. Compare those as well with the 2006 data, and you’ll see more of the same: Toronto’s downtown is not, in fact, very wealthy; it has a rather large number of households below the LICO. This will contribute to higher criminality. A few minutes browsing NYC.gov couldn’t come up with information as detailed as Toronto’s; if you have better luck than me, it’d definitely be a good point of comparison.

            Thus, as I see it, it’s less an issue of “criminals feel[ing] free to engage in dangerous acts and homicides in the core public spaces of Toronto”, which is true but misleading, because they are engaging in dangerous acts throughout and near the low-income neighbourhoods where they live just like those at Jane/Finch and in Malvern – they just happen to live within half a kilometre of Toronto’s highly successful tourist areas.

            Finally, to address your main point, about the symbolism of such acts: Yes. It is a problem of a sort, especially given the tendency of a shooting like this to make national news and reinforce every stupid negative stereotype about the city. But that doesn’t mean a) that a downtown murder is more important than a suburban murder, or b) that we should, as a city, react disproportionately to a downtown murder out of fear that it would hurt our reputation. Such responses give us London’s CCTV system, or Los Angeles’ police force of the ’90s: expensive, ineffective systems that often as not work against their stated goals.

            TL;DR: Poverty is bad. Work on that first. The city goes on regardless.

  • Anonymous

    Well, since you bring it up… the Ford mindset of cutting services regardless of the social cost and mindless celebration of police thuggery are contributing factors, and precisely what make the ‘Ford nation’ mentality so dangerous for our city.