TORONTO - He doesn’t have a mother or the benefit of being able to develop in her womb — let alone growing up with her love.
He doesn’t even have a name.
But what Toronto’s youngest and tiniest shooting victim does have, thanks to our amazing emergency and medical professionals, is a fighting chance at life.
“Uphill battle,” a source says of the one-day-old, who was extracted during a frantic C-section from his mom after she was heinously shot Sunday. “But miracles do happen.”
So do tragedies.
This boy’s mom was five months pregnant with this little guy, to be her third child. He was four months premature.
What kind of city could have a child born thanks to a shooting? Toronto — on pace for a record year in homicides and shootings.
There have already been 29 murder victims in 2016 — and if one death still under investigation is deemed a homicide, the total will be 30.
There were 15 at this time last year.
Homicide number 30 in 2015 came on Aug. 4 at superstar Drake’s party at Muzik — another innocent victim named Ariela Navarro-Fenoy, 26.
Innocent Candice Rochelle Bobb, 35, meanwhile, was shot Sunday in the chest in a car at Jamestown Cres. and John Garland Blvd.
“Disgraceful,” said Toronto Police Supt. Ron Taverner of 23 Division. “I can’t tell you how appalled we all are.”
In more than 40 years as a Toronto cop, he has seen a lot of things.
“This is a new one,” said an emotional Taverner. “I can’t say I have ever seen anything like this and I don’t ever want to see it again.”
Maybe this will be the one that finally gets people’s attention?
But we said that earlier in the day with the shocking shoot-up at the Shops at Don Mills. We said that with the elevator gun battle on Front St. We thought that with Ariela’s senseless murder.
We thought the same thing when 12-year-old Lecent Ross was shot to death, allegedly by a 13-year-old boy. We thought that when Joshua Yasay and Shyanne Charles were gunned down at a Danzig St. barbecue. We thought that when Jane Creba was slain on Boxing Day 2005 on Yonge St.
“It’s like they don’t have any regard for life,” Taverner said of today’s gangsters. “And there are an awful lot of guns out there.”
Just look at the crime statistics that some don’t want to talk about: Shooting occurrences are up 60% over last year.
Shooting victims are up 24%. Homicides are up 100%. Shooting homicides are up 216%. Unknown shootings with injury or even a located crime scene are up 253%.
“We need do something about it,” said Toronto Police Association president Mike McCormack, who has taken out a full page ad in Tuesday’s Toronto Sun and National Post to express average officers’ “frustration” over what they believe to be the elimination of “proactive” policing.
Who is going to be the first politically correct politician to say Toronto does not have the murder numbers of Chicago?
Please tell that to the tiny preemie clinging to life. Please explain to him what the hell you are talking about.
I don’t want much to hear from the politicians who threw the police under the bus on street checks, but there is one thing we can agree upon. If this little guy beats the odds and pulls through, we need to make an exception to the normal rules and ensure this child does not ever have another major hurdle in life.
Maybe a university could pledge a scholarship, maybe a company could donate clothes, food and, one day, a computer.
We owe him that much.
We can’t give him back his mother, but her slaying should be the final senseless murder that we tolerate.
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