The corner of York St. and University Ave. in Toronto, where a reported swarming attack left a man dead and eight teenage girls charged with second degree murder, on Dec. 21.COLE BURSTON/The New York Times News Service
Katy Chiappetta, a resident of a shelter in downtown Toronto, says people need to know more about the life of the 59-year-old man she watched fatally injured from stab wounds in the city’s core on Saturday night.
“He was doing okay but then something bad happened again and it was back to homelessness,” she said, speaking of his life before this weekend’s violence. The very end was hard to bear witness to. “I saw the aftereffects of what happened to this guy,” she said, adding that “he looked like he was in very bad pain.”
On Tuesday, Toronto police announced that eight girls, aged 13 to 16, were charged with second-degree murder in connection with the stabbing. Authorities in the city have publicly identified the victim so far only as Homicide No. 68 of 2022.
But Ms. Chiappetta knew him as Kenny and said she had heard that he was originally from Hong Kong. In recent months, she said, he had bounced between the Strathcona Hotel shelter where she lives, and the streets. But he once had a different life. “He’s a father and a grandfather,” she said.
Trouble erupted Saturday around midnight outside the Strathcona, which is near Toronto’s Royal York Hotel and Union Station, the city’s busiest transit hub. Ms. Chiappetta said she was outside when she heard a high-pitched scream from a group of “very young” girls. She says she glanced at them arguing – and running away.
Her acquaintance, Kenny, was sitting on steps outside a nearby office tower. He had no visible wounds, she said, but she could see blood on his hands and mouth. And he wasn’t responding to questions.
How Canada’s youth criminal justice system handles murder charges
When paramedics arrived, he appeared to have trouble standing up, Ms. Chiappetta said. “All he said was ‘I don’t feel well’ to the ambulance guy.”
She says she locked eyes with him as he was put onto a stretcher and taken into the vehicle. “He turned very white in his face. I knew then it went from A to B, it’s worse. He was still looking at me.”
He died in hospital. Police are withholding his identity as they continue to try to notify family. “The name will be made public via news release when the time comes,” said Stephanie Sayer, a spokeswoman for the Toronto Police Service.
The accused teenagers’ identities are also being withheld, which is a standard condition of the Youth Criminal Justice Act. While many details about the crime remain unknown, it has generated headlines around the world given the young ages of the accused female teenagers.
“We haven’t had a similar event in recent history where there was such a high number of young women involved,” said Rick Ruddell, a professor in Justice Studies at the University of Regina.
The specialist in juvenile criminals said that young people are significantly more likely to be involved in group crimes than adults. Prof. Ruddell pointed out that this weekend’s fatal stabbing in Toronto is at least the third homicide in Canada during the past nine months that police allege was perpetrated by a group of youth.
In April, five teenagers, ages 13 to 16, were charged in the shooting death of a 27-year-old man in Saskatoon. The same month in Edmonton, seven teens were charged after the stabbing death of a 16-year-old. One of those seven accused was a 17-year-old girl.
Historically, young people have been more likely than adults to commit violent crimes in groups. Between 2005 and 2014, 60 per cent of youth accused in homicides were co-offenders, compared to 35 per cent of adults, according to a 2016 Statistics Canada report. While male youths commit more overall group crimes, female youths appear proportionately more prone to harass victims in pairs or as a group.
In youth crimes, “decision-making deteriorates as the group size gets bigger. With peer pressure, they egg each other on,” said Prof. Ruddell. “We’ve recognized for some time that those parts in the brain responsible for higher-level thinking, maturity and making good decisions just aren’t fully developed.”
Sibylle Artz, a professor emeritus in the School of Child and Youth Care at the University of Victoria, says that adults should take seriously red flags of aggression in a child’s or an adolescent’s behaviour.
“If we see people of this age doing this, there will have been a perceptive teacher, parent, grandparent or neighbour who will have raised their hand and said, ‘This isn’t going where it should,” Dr. Artz said, adding that, “People don’t grow out of it, and we have to pay attention.”
Boys ages 12 to 17 were 2½-times more likely than girls to be accused of violent crimes, according to a 2019 report on female offenders from Statistics Canada. Most young women accused of violent crimes know their victims; just 12 per cent are accused of attacking a stranger.
In Toronto, police have said that the girls now arrested mostly likely connected on social media and met up in person from different parts of the city.
Ms. Chiappetta says she still does not understand exactly what happened outside the Strathcona Hotel last Saturday night.
“It was very shocking that these girls would come from different parts of town,” she said. “Just to come here – to do what?”