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Newsstand: January 28, 2015
Runny noses to the left, hacking coughs to the right. Is there anyone in Toronto who isn’t sick right now? In the news: a nurse was robbed while rushing to help a man who was hit by a car, a woman was defrauded of $2,000 by a fake loan company, tenants at 34 Heydon Park Road were without heat for almost a week, and the Matador Club returns.
On Friday night, Rainne Carragher was walking to her night shift job as a nurse at a Toronto hospital when she witnessed a man get hit by a car near Fort York Boulevard and Dan Leckie Way. She immediately rushed to his aid, dropping her bag and personal belongings in the process. Carragher says that after about 20 minutes of attending to the man and waiting for paramedics to arrive on the scene, she realized that she did not have her bag with her, which contained her wallet, identification, stethoscope, and MacBook. When she went to retrieve it, it was gone. Some of her items—including her wallet—were found nearby, but the rest of her belongings are still missing.
In other news that will make you question the state of humanity, a Toronto woman says that she was defrauded of $2,000 after a loan company duped her into believing that she could get a loan to cover medical expenses for her dying mother. When Ashlee Henry was denied a loan by three separate banking institutions, she contacted Community Funds Union via a local newspaper ad. The purported loan provider was prepared to give her a $40,000 loan, after asking for a $2,000 “insurance fee” to be paid upfront by Henry. Desperate for the money to help pay for her mother’s expenses, Henry’s husband paid the fee and they never heard from the company again. The company has since shuttered its website and phone lines. Experts are quick to point out that asking for fees in advance of disbursing loan funds is illegal in Ontario, but it does not prevent fraudsters from using the tactic to prey on vulnerable people.
Tenants at 34 Heydon Park Road, near College Street and Dovercourt Road, have been without heat during this latest Toronto cold snap. Residents say that heat went out last Wednesday night and has yet to be fully restored. It is not the first time that heat has gone out for residents. Earlier this month it was knocked out for upwards of four days. City inspectors had difficulty locating the owner of the building, Rakesh Gupta, who was out of the country and ended up being fined $385 on Monday. The City since confirmed that a broken pump near the boiler room had been fixed as of Tuesday night and that heat should be restored to all units imminently.
The Matador Club, a once-famous music venue that had seen the likes of Johnny Cash and Joni Mitchell grace the stage, is set to get a new lease on life after being closed for eight years. The new and improved Matador will reopen as a concert space and 3,400 square-foot ballroom that will also cater to private events. Plans for the club do not include an after-hours bar, which was a famous part of its previous incarnation. The revamped space also comes with a revamped name: when it reopens in January of 2016, it will be called the Matador Ballroom.