It was the second time in a month that the terrified mom’s Toronto Community Housing Corporation unit on Neptune Dr. had been riddled with bullets — this time three of her kids were asleep upstairs.
“I was on the couch and I heard gunshots, so I just dropped to the floor,” Francis said Tuesday.
She said the shooting happened just before 2 a.m. and panic set in as a bullet ripped through the living room window of her home, located near Bathurst St. and Hwy. 401. Another round pierced the kitchen window and slammed into the side of her refrigerator’s freezer door, leaving an indent about 20 cm from where another bullet tore through the fridge four weeks earlier.
Francis lay frozen on the floor until the shooting stopped.
“I looked through the window but I didn’t see anybody, so I ran upstairs to make sure my kids were OK,” she said.
Her daughter, 3, and two sons, 8 and 16, were not hit. But the youngest boy came dangerously close.
A bullet pierced an upper-floor window, sailed above her son as he slept, ricocheted off a wall, and ended up in a closet at the far side of the bedroom.
Francis, who also has an 18-year-old son living elsewhere, said she can’t understand why anyone would target her home.
On Jan. 6, when gunshots tore through her kitchen window around noon, nobody was home. But it prompted Francis to take her kids to a shelter.
The family returned home Monday, hours before their house was shot up again.
Francis said she is pleading with TCHC to relocate her and her kids. The family is staying at a hotel for now.
TCHC spokesman Lisa Murray did not say much due to privacy issues, but confirmed the family is now at the top of the special priority transfer list.
“We are working with the family and we are making arrangements to have them relocated as soon as possible,” she said.
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