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| courtesy of clumsy time from Flickr |
Probably every blog or tweet about Toronto in the last 12 hours has mentioned about what happened at The Eaton Centre last night at around 6:30 p.m. My family was just pulling out of the restaurant to head home when I turned on the radio and heard about this shooting. Apparently, it had happened just when we had left home for dinner.
Even when I was living in Japan, I'd heard about some of the ugliness that had occurred at Toronto's largest shopping mall: swarmings, the Kreba shooting in 2007, and the usual teenage idiocies. And so when I heard this breaking news on the radio, I figured that this must be pretty bad. And sure enough, it was. One dead, seven injured although the one kid hit by a bullet seems to be getting out of the woods. But Chief Bill Blair of the police and Mayor Rob Ford sounded shaken during their respective interviews which speak of the gravity of the situation.
Make no doubt about it. Whether or not this was an act of a gang member getting revenge or just a nutjob enacting a fantasy, he/she is Public Enemy No. 1....problem is, there doesn't seem to be any good description of him/her, and with the ensuing panic, it's going to be tough to find this person. But he/she has to be found. Otherwise, Torontonians will go down into a further level of urban fear. Or worse, we'll fatalistically form another shell of cynicism about life in a North American city.
It's been a bad week for crime. Psychopathic porn star killer, psychotic face cannibals and indiscriminate spree shooter.
