A 14-year-old boy is in hospital and a 7-year-old girl was briefly missing after a shooting and an unrelated fatal stabbing on Saturday.
The little girl was taken from a car parked near High Park after a man, one of the four occupants in the vehicle, was fatally stabbed in the neck.
Toronto police say the incident happened around 2:30 p.m. Saturday on leafy Windermere Ave. in Swansea, just north of the Queensway.
Four people were in a beige Neon, investigators said, when one of them, a man, was stabbed in the neck. He was taken to St. Joseph’s hospital, where he died of his injuries.
In the panic following the stabbing another occupant of the car, a white male around 5-foot-8, then walked away with the 7-year-old girl. Although the child was reported missing, police said they did not believe it was a kidnapping.
At 7:30 p.m. Saturday, a stretch of Windermere was still closed to traffic as police forensics experts examined the car and the scene. The Neon was parked on the street, and did not appear to have crashed or sustained any serious damage. The fourth passenger, a woman, was being questioned.
Toronto police sergeant Darren Moxham of 11 Division said several witnesses from the neighbourhood had been taken in for questioning. Windermere has single family homes and lowrise units on the east side, and a grassy slope lined with apartment buildings on the west.
Moxham could not say if the passengers in the car were related, or how they knew each other; police released no names and no details about the incident Saturday.
In the earlier incident involving the wounding of the 14-year-old boy, investigators say the boy was shot around 3 a.m. by someone who walked up to the window of his Cecil St. house, in Grange Park, and began firing.
The boy, one of seven children and an adult in the house at the time, was in the front room of the family home, in bed and using a laptop computer.
He was hit several times in his lower body, and bullets went through the laptop, igniting the device and setting the mattress on fire.
Saturday morning, the boy’s mother told reporters that the 14-year-old was hit in the calf and lower buttock and that a bullet was lodged near his spine. The injuries are non-life-threatening and the mother — the family has not yet been identified by police — said she believed the laptop had saved his life.
Burned and melted, the computer lay on the discarded mattress in the front yard of the home Saturday afternoon. A family friend said the boy was undergoing surgery.
“Who would want to shoot a 14-year-old boy as he lay in his bed?” his mother asked, saying that her son was not in trouble with the police and had been “offered scholarships.”
The single mother said she has nine children, of which seven were home at the time of the shooting. She was with him at the Hospital for Sick Children on Saturday. He is expected to survive.
Be the first to comment