Читать книгу What Killed Jane Creba - Anita Arvast - Страница 9

T-dot-O

Rap it everywhere I go.

— Kardinal Offishall, “The Anthem”

Yonge Street. The longest street in Canada. The Guinness Book of World Records recognized it as the longest street in the world until 1999. It starts at Lake Ontario in Toronto before wending its way north through suburbs and, eventually, into the forests and rocky scrapes of Canada’s near north. There, it somehow transforms from Yonge Street into Highway 11, connecting the hubbub of Toronto with the moose of Algonquin Park and the endless frontier of the Canadian Shield, where there are vast skies and virtual emptiness. Most Canadians don’t live the solitude that is the “North,” and which is what most people outside of our country think of when they picture Canada — polar bears, moose, trees, ice, and rocks. But we’re more urban than people think.

Toronto is only about a two-and-a-half-hour drive from the U.S. border. North of Toronto, Canadians own rifles to shoot moose and bears. Close to the border, where most of our population lives, our kids get contraband handguns from the neighbours to the south, who have much laxer gun laws.

Toronto. T.O.,we call it. T-dot-O.

The Zanzibar strip club on Yonge Street is lit up with neon — flashing orange and red signs a hundred feet tall stand over its meagre entrance, trying to seduce people to come inside. It’s probably the place table dancing in Canada originated, and lap dances are cheaply served up by women in spandex ranging in ages and nationalities. Neon is everywhere on Yonge — the open signs at the money exchanges and hole-in-the-wall nail salons and places that offer to unlock your phone. The two-hundred-foot signs that advertise new television shows bounce their reflections off the glass highrises. Everything flashes for attention.

Voices rebound off the pavement and sidewalks — some, the homeless asking for change; some, the outrages of a dispute; some, brazen teens singing in a drunken stupor; most just the idle conversations of people walking to and from the points in their lives. There is a constant white noise of cars travelling, of taxis honking, of subways rumbling underfoot. And about every ten minutes, the sound of a siren echoes as it takes an emergency patient to one of the many hospitals in the downtown core.

Most people don’t bother to pick out the nuances of conversation and noise and light until they are told they need to pay attention. On the day after Christmas 2005, we were told in no uncertain terms.

The cops and newspapers had already decided 2005 was the Year of the Gun in Toronto. There had been way too many gun homicides that year — the heat from the concrete jungles was seeping out into the polished neighbourhoods of the suburbs and the traditional safe zones of the middle class. Gang warfare was out of control. The town was no longer “Toronto the safe,” or “Toronto the Good,” or “Toronto the big city where shit doesn’t happen like it happens in L.A.”

That year there were 70 homicides in the city, 78 potential ones investigated. The year before there had been 60.

In the grand scheme of things, Toronto’s murder rate wasn’t that high. From 1998 to 2007, the homicide rate was 1.8 per 1,000 people. Put in context, Winnipeg’s was 3.2 and Edmonton’s 2.9.[1] Was the city as big and bad as L.A.? Not so much. Their rate was 10 per 1,000. Philadelphia was a whopping 23, and even the quiet retirement city of Phoenix, Arizona was 13.1.[2] Go figure. That’s where many middle-class Toronto snowbirds go to escape winter.

But 2005 still got called the Year of the Gun in Toronto, because of those 70 homicides that year, 52 were by gun, almost double the 27 in 2004.[3] And the kicker was the death of Jane Creba the day after Christmas.

December 26 is a holiday in Canada called Boxing Day. It’s a big shopping day with great deals — people picking up boxes of new stuff. The stores were packed with people as usual that day. And the big Eaton Centre shopping mecca on Toronto’s Yonge Street was, as per its tradition, busting out onto the sidewalks and streets. As dusk approached, pedestrians ruled the roads by the mall; Christmas lights brought the windows to life with their train sets running, glittering gowns flowing, and mechanical elves dancing and making gifts, while the usual neon light continued to flash.

To the east of this shopping hub is a low-income housing neighbourhood called Regent Park. A concrete labyrinth for displaced immigrants and the generally impoverished — almost seventy acres in total, with people just crammed on top of each other. Seventy acres of cells, mostly three-storey, run-down apartments where the inmates could get out if they could only find work that would raise them out of the dependence on socially assisted housing. The average income in Regent Park at the time was half of what the average Torontonian made; 68 percent of residents were considered to live below the poverty line, and there was a significantly higher population of people under the age of eighteen than anywhere else in Toronto. As the U.S. had discovered in cities like Detroit, New York, and L.A., when you cram that many poor people together in that big a space, there are bound to be issues.

Marz was in the Regent Park project housing on Boxing Day. A young man of Jamaican descent who had seen his share of heat in the hood.

The party was on at Elmer’s. Elmer was a nine-to-fiver who Marz had known since infancy. Their buildings were next door to each other. Elmer’s place was a home, as opposed to a hangout — it spoke of the working class, with its mismatched furniture and old appliances. The home had the standard pictures of kids on the fridge alongside their artwork from younger years.

Elmer picked up trash — like junk, scrap metal, and steel — and sold it. Elmer’s mom and pops weren’t really involved with the hood politics. They said hi to the neighbours and made small talk. That’s about it. It’s what a lot of people in the hood do. Stay low, keep your family close and your nose out of trouble. Embrace your ancestry and your children.

Short and Boy were at Elmer’s, too. Drinking beer. Shooting the breeze. They weren’t the types who stayed low and out of trouble.

Growing up, Short was called Too Short because of his small stature. He got over that in his teens when he managed to get over the 5΄8˝ marker and condense his moniker. Marz didn’t think of Short as a particularly good-looking guy. According to him, Short was … well … short … and had “kind of buggy eyes,” and wore his hair “short-cropped … like it was just growing back from a haircut or something.” Short was also heavily scarred — on the forehead, between the eyes, and on each arm. His police files never identified the scars, but clearly he had a history of confrontations.

Boy was different. First of all, he was white, so he was sometimes called White Boy. With his formal name as Milan Mijatovic, he certainly didn’t fit the stereotype of the Jamaican Canadians that the majority of people in the city just assumed were the problem people in Regent Park. But that’s the way assumptions and stereotypes work. A way to simplify what’s actually complex.

Boy was about the same height as Short and he was good friends with Marz’s youngest brother, Kareem. He even gave Marz’s mom bail money to get Kareem out of detention one time. The money came from drugs and guns, but that’s just what friends do for each other. Boy didn’t typically get into much trouble even though he was known to be a major dealer. It was debatable whether or not he packed a weapon. He had Short do that for him on Boxing Day, even if Marz would eventually say otherwise: “I would assume [Milan/Boy] had a gun,” Marz eventually told police when pushed to testify. Marz’s brother wound up getting a gun for his own protection when he dealt. “And my brother’s not hardcore into it, but considering that those were his friends, and people are gunning at him, he got his gun.”

At Elmer’s, Boy and Short came up with the idea that they should go down to the Eaton Centre to get some shoes for their kids. Marz thought it best not to go downtown that day. He was the wisest of the lot. As he eventually told the court: “Cause I wasn’t in the mood to be in any situation where anything can happen. Where I’ll be involved in that situation.… Boy really wanted to go down to get the shoes. I forewarned him. Like situations might pop off down there. You might see people you might not like.”

What was going on in the hood? Well, there was trouble between some groups of people. Some guys from north Regent Park weren’t getting along with some guys from south Regent Park. Bigger than that, though. Some guys from various areas of Toronto weren’t getting along with other guys in various areas of Toronto. Not gangs. Individuals. Guys who just didn’t like each other.

There was too much already going on in the hood. Lots of shout outs and shootouts. The guys who’d been around for a while, like Marz, knew better than to put themselves out there on a public day when all this shit is going on. Boxing Day. Caribana. Big festivals and gatherings were a no-no if you knew people were looking for trouble or looking for you. Why bother putting yourself out there on a day when you know all your enemies are going to be out? Marz was several years older than those other guys heading downtown; he’d developed a code that comes with maturity — you don’t go looking for shit on busy days, let alone take your problems to the streets.

Inability to see the logic of this code might have something to do with the fact that adolescent minds aren’t fully developed. Laurence Steinberg is a professor of psychology at Temple University in the U.S. who has written extensively about the neuroscience of risky behaviour in youth. His brain imaging studies have shown that teenagers, for instance, respond to peer pressure in ways that make them behave recklessly. Neuroscientists at the Belmont hospital in Massachusetts have shown that adolescents rely much more on a part of the brain called the amygdala, while adults rely on the more developed frontal cortex.

What does this mean? It means teenagers brains aren’t yet wired quite right to make sound judgments. It means they use the “reactive” part of the brain more than the “thinking and strategizing” part. Of course, it doesn’t mean teenagers are wired to carry guns. But if they are, chances are they aren’t modulating emotional responses the same way that adults do — they aren’t thinking about the consequences. Seems the mood swings, temper tantrums, and stupid, risky behaviour exhibited in teens doesn’t have so much to do with raging hormones as it does with a brain that isn’t yet “working” as adults understand. Throw in some other stupid teenagers who aren’t logically wired, and the risk-taking ramps up considerably.

All this came together in Regent Park that day, with the more mature guys knowing rivalries needed to stay in the hood, while the younger punks wanted to head out into the world, rivalries be damned. As Marz would eventually tell it, “you can’t fix stupid” — even though he likely wasn’t referring to neuroscience. Bottom line is that most kids are going to rely on their peers to tell them what’s real rather than listen to the older folks passing on their wisdom.

Like many teens, they thought their parents or anybody even a little older didn’t understand the world they lived in — and certainly didn’t have advice to give them.

Like many teens, they got stuff wrong.

And so it was. As the party at Elmer’s wound down, Marz was adamant that he wouldn’t be putting himself out there, even if Boy was one of his brother’s closest friends. Marz opted to go home to watch some daytime drama on the television, while Short and Boy headed to Yonge Street. The two had already been targeted in their neighbourhood. Shot at several times, they wouldn’t take public transit and knew better than to stand on a street corner trying to flag a cab. They called one instead.

Marz didn’t know it at the time, but one of the reasons Short had been targeted was because he was ratting out some other brothers in an area of western Toronto called Black Creek. There was also a housing project north-east of Black Creek nicknamed “the Jungle” — high-density, socially assisted housing not unlike Regent Park. Short had lived there at one point, but now he was just serving as an informant to the cops about some of the guys living there and in Black Creek. So, it was ironic that on this Boxing Day, Short was wearing a T-shirt with a big stop sign on it. All the rage with some of the “tough guys” from the States. Under the big red stop sign was a single word. Snitching.

Seems Short was okay to don the wear without walking the talk.