The neighbourhood is different. The crime is the same.
Posted by Dalton48 on 19 Jun 2008 at 08:39 am | Tagged as: Current Events, Stuff, Toronto
Do you remember Tyler Roulston? What about Tristan Wright? Jonathan Rodrigues? What high schools did they go to? They were all shooting victims under the age of 25 this year in Toronto. One may have been known to police. Another was shot in front of a house party with dozens of witnesses. Another was killed at home. Unfortunately, since they all died in the “east end”, where shootings are apparently just another inconvenience of being poor, not white, and living in a high-rise, I can’t tell you much more about them.
On the other hand, I know a lot about Dylan Ellis and Oliver Martin. They grew up in Rosedale. They’d completed postsecondary education. Girls had crushes on them. They participated in organized sports. This morning’s Globe and Mail even tells me what one of them liked as a favourite snack. Did I mention they grew up in Rosedale?
And, it seems, the police also know a lot about the two. In some magical fashion, although the two were “not known” to police, Det. Sgt. Gary Giroux was almost instantly able to assert to reporters just hours after they were shot that they were “certainly not – and never have been – living any high-risk or criminal lifestyle”. It’s easy to see why this conclusion was easy to draw. As we all know, the wealthy are never involved in criminal activity.
A paragraph in the Globe clumsily highlights why this story has been the focus of so much ink, when random shootings of young men in the city are anything but unusual:
The violent crime shook the city and surprised many who struggled to understand why the young men from Rosedale were killed in a brand of crime associated with neighbourhoods very different from their own.
I don’t mean to be minimize the sadness of this situation. It just seems to me that the violent, random, untimely deaths of young men who had little are just as tragic as the violent, random, untimely deaths of young men who had it all. And it also seems to me that Martin and Ellis’ families now have a lot in common with many other bereaved families in neighbourhoods “very different from their own” — whatever the reporting around this story might suggest.
The other somewhat similar case from a few years ago was the very different treatment given to the murders of Chantel Dunn and Jane Creba:
http://watrvision.blogspot.com/2006/10/may-god-give-you-peace-i-have-been.html
I agree, the bias in the coverage has been revolting. My sister was a room-mate of one of the murdered for three years and I may have even on one occasion met him–can’t quite remember. That said, the papers are only feeding what their readers want. This was brought to my attention when I tried to argue with someone (actually, my mother, but we’ll leave that to one side) that the story didn’t make sense. Witness in the back of the car who has kept mum. Shooting two people dead through the front of a range rover window would require either amazing luck or skill. The pathetic excuse that they were just returning keys. My mother got all huffy about it and we agreed to disagree. I, however, missed the obvious point you note that the police knew quite a bit about these youths who were unknown to the police. Will bring this to her attention today. My godawful morbiphillic sis attended both memorials.
I agree with Posted by Dalton48 about how differently crime is treated when one skin colour is black and when one is underprivilleged. There is something really fishy about these two guys who were killed in SUV while they were returning keys. I think the cops know much more than what they are revealing. I dont believe that this was a situation of road rage.