John Goddard
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Ayoob Adam, 16, was visiting his aunt on the weekend on Dixon Rd., between Islington and Kipling Aves., when he heard a commotion below, between the highrises.
He went down to investigate and ended up fatally stabbed in the chest.
"Wrong place, wrong time," his grieving mother, Sirad Mohamed, 52, said yesterday, dressed head-to-ankles Somali style in black robes at her apartment, several kilometres east of the crime scene.
In 1992, the boy's father disappeared in Mogadishu soon after the Somali civil war broke out, she said. His body was never recovered.
Three daughters, in their early 20s, complete the family.
Canada was to be their safe refuge.
Shortly after Adam went downstairs, at around 5a.m. Sunday, police responded to sounds of gunfire at 340 Dixon Rd.
They found Adam on the ground behind the building along with another youth, who had been shot.
Both were taken to hospital.
Adam was pronounced dead.
The other victim remains alive but police have not released his name or details of his condition.
No witnesses have come forward, Adam's mother said, leaving her with almost no information about what took place.
Her features pinched and lined, she stood at her apartment door surrounded by similarly dressed women who helped comfort her and translated, while others occasionally arrived with bowls of salads and platters of hot food covered in foil.
"This has to be stopped," the mother said quietly of the youth violence plaguing the community. "Nobody is helping."
On the family's arrival in Canada, they moved to the Kingsview Complex on Dixon Rd., one friend said.
Mohamed volunteered at the community centre.
Adam made lasting boyhood friendships, which he kept up after the family moved several years ago to the Jane St. and Highway 401 area.
Adam was in Grade 11 at Nelson A. Boylen Collegiate Institute, on Falstaff Ave., a school of 400 students with the motto, "Good things come from small schools."
"We need a stepping stone," said one woman who declined to give her name but said her nephew was "gunned down" in 2005.
"We live in a ghetto," she said.
"The system is designed for us to stay here. Our kids are at risk every day. There are no jobs for them. Their only opportunity is to be killed."
Another woman said security cameras might have made up for uncooperative witnesses, but the complex has none.
The killing, said a third, calls to mind the shooting last year in nearby Lawrence Heights of 18-year-old Abdikarim Ahmed Abdikarim. It was caught on video but the quality was too poor to positively identify the shooter or his companion.
Five survivors of that shooting sustained wounds but all refused to testify, and the jailed suspects were released.
Source: Toronto Star, June 09, 2009