This startling statistic comes directly from Toronto police. If you use any other weapon, your chances of being charged skyrocket.
Why are so many gun homicides unsolved in Toronto?
Metroland Media’s investigative team spoke to police, community activists and academics to try to identify the barriers, and some possible solutions.
In this first of a two-part investigation, we tell the stories of Demal Graham and Kiesingar Gunn, two young men shot to death in the prime of their lives. No one has been charged in their murders.
Demal Graham ‘was someone you could definitely confide in’
People know who killed Demal Graham — about that, Shauna Brown is certain.
Brown started hearing rumours a couple of months after her son, a shy man devoted to making music in his basement studio, was shot in their driveway on July 23, 2017.
Graham, 25, was watching his daughter playing on townhouse steps across the street when a car came circling by on Empringham Drive in Malvern.
Police later told Brown they didn’t think her son was an “intended target.”
Maybe he was just the first man his killers saw.
But more than a year later, he’s dead and they’re still anonymous, except, Brown believes, to a sizable number of people who know something but won’t tell, because that would mean “snitching.”
Some are “close enough to have known me. Some of these people have been inside my home. They knew my granddaughter, they know my girls,” said Brown.
“There’s a lot of people who know the answer, and we don’t.”
To Brown, struggling with anxiety and depression after her son’s death, people keeping the killers’ secrets are “no better than the person who pulled the trigger,” she said.
“They have kids, they have sons, they have grandchildren. How would they feel if this happened to them?”
Brown moved her family away from Empringham, where they lived for 12 years, and where her son attended barbecues, and participated in countless water fights. She distanced herself and her family from many friends, even some relations.
She said her son’s case “could be solved at any time,” if certain people broke free from “the pull of the street mentality” and gave information to police.
If people stay silent because of the code against “snitching,” said Brown, using a common term for co-operating with police, they’re promoting more violence and serving men like the one who fired the fatal shots at Graham.
“This person is out free, walking the streets. They’re giving more loyalty to this person who shot and killed my son than to the memory and life of my son. It’s cowardly.”
Music became an outlet for Graham — called Milli by many — after his father died when he was 12. He wanted to start a children’s music program in Malvern. He kept to himself a lot, sitting on his steps, writing down his problems and turning them into songs.
If you got to know him, Graham was really funny, said Janese Davis, a longtime friend and neighbour. “He was someone you could definitely confide in,”
When he got shot, a friend called Davis.
“She’s like, ‘Demal’s gone.’ That was definitely the last person for me to think would be ever be gone like that,” she remembered last month. “He was never that type of guy.”
Davis’s favourite track of Graham’s is one he recorded for his daughter, I Try, in which Graham sings he wants to shield her from violence and would do anything for her.
Rock-a-bye baby, no diamonds and pearls/I’m going harder than that/I’m trying to give you the world.
It could be true people know who killed him, Davis said. “In the community, when certain people know certain things, they don’t want to be labelled as a snitch.”
“No snitching,” she believes, is rooted in the same “ego and pride” which sets many shootings off, the idea that, “if someone stepped on my shoes, I’m going to kill you for that,” Davis said.
“At the end of the day, a bullet doesn’t have a name to it, so a bullet can kill anybody.”
Early on the day Graham was murdered, two other men, Dwayne Campbell, 30, and Rinaldo Cole, 33, were also shot to death during a crowded barbecue party on Gennela Square, a Morningside Heights street a short distance from Empringham.
Those shooters, whose gunfire also wounded a woman, haven’t been caught either.
Brown wants the public to know it wasn’t just her family who has suffered, but a whole neighbourhood.
She knows people may be afraid to talk.
“But we have to testify (once the shooters are caught). On top of being victimized once, we have to go through the whole process. To me, there’s no excuse why someone else couldn’t do the same thing.”
She has never wanted revenge, she said. That just “perpetuates the cycle” and would force another mother to go through what she’s gone through.
But Brown wants justice for Graham, for her granddaughter most of all.
“She got the least amount of time with him, and she’ll deal with the effects the rest of her life,” said Brown.
“My family and the family of the person who killed my son, we’re now connected, and we’ll be for the rest of our lives.”
Kiesingar Gunn, ‘the most amazing’ father
“Stop worrying about me. ... Nothing’s going to happen to me.”
Those were Kiesingar Gunn’s final words to his mother.
Three days later, the 26-year-old father of four was dead, hit by a stray bullet out front of the Forty2 Supperclub at 42 Mowat Ave.
Evelyn Fox said she was watching the news on Sept. 8, 2016, when she turned to her son and warned him not to get into arguments with anyone because “people carry guns.” It was then that Gunn told his mother not to worry, assuring her that nothing would happen to him.
“And that was our last conversation,” Fox said. “It haunts me.”
Gunn, the oldest of four children, was born May 2, 1990. He grew up in the Jane and Finch area until age 10 when he moved to Scarborough’s West Hill neighbourhood with his family.
“He was very loving but very adventurous and accident prone,” Fox said in a recent interview. “He was adventurous to the point where I had numerous hospital visits for broken bones, stitches, you name it.”
Gunn played baseball and football; it was during football games that he broke his clavicle bone and nose.
Fox noted her son loved to play pranks on his family. “He was forever trying to make people laugh and bring a joke to a situation. He was very heartwarming like that.”
And Gunn also took good care of his two youngest siblings. “Kiesingar was 14 and he was not only a big brother but almost like a father figure to them. He used to take the kids to daycare and from daycare when I was working and going to school,” Fox said. “And then he would have dinner made for them, give them a bath and everything before I even got home.”
Gunn went to Sir Robert L. Borden Business and Technical Institute and volunteered at Variety Village. After graduating high school, Gunn went straight into the workforce. He worked for a roofing company and a racking company up until his death.
“I finally talked him into going back to post-secondary school, and he was supposed to start a home renovation program in the September that he passed away,” Fox said.
Gunn was engaged to his girlfriend, who he had three of his four children with.
Fox described her son as “the most amazing” father.
“The kids were glued to him because he was so playful,” she said. “If one kid wanted spaghetti for dinner and another one wanted hamburgers and the other one wanted something else, he would make all three different meals. He was just that type of father: very engaged, hands-on.”
Gunn rarely went to clubs though he had been to the Forty2 Supperclub twice and liked it enough to return a third time for a birthday party with his fiancée and a man Fox described as her son’s godbrother. A fourth person, the godbrother’s friend, also went with them.
It was 4 a.m. Sept. 11, 2016 when Gunn, his fiancée and his godbrother left the club and saw a commotion outside; a crowd had formed around two men who were arguing.
“My godson happened to notice that his friend was in the crowd, the friend that they ended up going to the club with,” said Fox, noting her godson pulled over the van and walked towards the crowd to get his friend.
Gunn also got out of the vehicle and approached the crowd of 20 to 30 people.
“And within seconds he was hit by a stray bullet,” Fox said. “He was just going to stand close by, just to make sure that nothing happened with my godson.”
Gunn, shot in the head, was taken to St. Michael’s Hospital where he died at 9:25 p.m. that day.
Police confirmed Gunn wasn’t the intended target of the shooting.
Police and Fox believe there are witnesses who know the identity of the killer.
Fox said that not having justice for her son’s death has made it hard to move on.
“It (an arrest) would at least help me try to heal. I wouldn’t be harbouring all this anger that prevents me from even attempting to heal.”
There has been a recent attempt to reinvigorate the investigation.
On the second anniversary of the murder, police posted a $50,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the shooter.
Det. Leslie Dunkley told reporters at the time that prior to the shooting the suspect was among more than 200 patrons inside the club. “After the shots were fired, (the suspect) fled to a waiting vehicle that was parked on Mowat Avenue, and the vehicle proceeded northbound towards Liberty Street,” he said, adding there was someone there “that can identify the shooter and that knows the shooter ... and we’re asking that those individuals come forward.”
The suspect is black with a dark complexion, 18 to 22 years old, five feet 11 inches to six-feet tall with braided hair, possibly in cornrows, and a slim build. He wore a white hooded sweatshirt with black prints or a logo.
“If he has any type of moral compass at all, if his mother raised him with any type of morals or ethics period, then the right thing for him to do is to turn himself in,” Fox said.
As for why more witnesses haven’t yet come forward, Fox suggested “fear” could be part of the problem.
“I don’t know if it’s fear from their community (or) fear from that person, but this guy is not the mafia, he’s not a hit man,” she said. “I don’t understand why it is people would be fearful, maybe of their reputation. Is someone’s reputation more important than a person’s life?”
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