Caught in the crossfire
TORONTO -- They were part of such a perfect cross-section of modern Toronto and what they saw, and in some cases what happened to them, also offered a perfect glimpse of the rarest but most cruel crime in the modern city.
Jeyie Su had nothing in common with Carl Turner and Jessica Fung until Boxing Day three years ago, when in a fashion they met on Yonge Street downtown. The foreign university student, the corporate lawyer and the banker - and the witnesses or victim-witnesses who have testified here before them - were all out shopping the sales on a warm winter evening.
Jeyie Su and her friend Helen Yiu had just decided to look for a theatre to catch a movie, while Mr. Turner and his girlfriend Ms. Fung, and his parents and his eight-year-old son, were coming out of the Future Shop, then located almost directly across Yonge Street from the Foot Locker on the west side.
Ms. Su and Ms. Yiu were caught in the crossfire of a gunfight that broke out on the crowded sidewalks of the busiest retail day of the year - they were both shot, Ms. Su twice - while Mr. Turner and Ms. Fung were witnesses to it, from the relative safety of the other side, the east side, of Yonge.
Ms. Su, Mr. Turner and Ms. Fung all testified yesterday at the second-degree murder trial of a 20-year-old who, because he was 17 at the time, can be identified only as JSR.
He is pleading not guilty, and it is not alleged that the 9 mm handgun he was found with when he was arrested shortly after the shooting fired the bullet that killed 15-year-old Jane Creba, who, as the jurors have heard, paid with her life for yielding to the call of nature and dashing across Yonge to use a bathroom in the Pizza Pizza on the other side.
Ms. Creba took a bullet to the back, which perforated her aorta; she never made it across to the east side.
Ms. Su was first to testify. Like Ms Yiu, who testified late last month with a Cantonese interpreter at her side, Ms. Su also had an interpreter, Mandarin-speaking in her case, beside her in the witness box. The interpreter sometimes appeared superfluous, as when Ms. Su was asked what she was wearing that day, replied in audible English, "Jeans," and translator Charlie Zhao said, "I was wearing jeans."
She and Ms. Yiu, she said, had just asked a passerby whether there was a theatre further north on Yonge, and were told there wasn't. They turned around at the Pizza Pizza and began walking back to the Eaton Centre when Ms. Su "felt numbness in my leg" and stumbled.
Almost at the same time, "I saw some flashes of light - and also heard a noise, bup-bup-bup." The light was coming from the middle of the body of a man she saw pointing in her direction, but not at her. She heard more of the bup-bup-bup noises, saw more flashes of light. "I was nervous," she said with massive understatement. "I tried to walk slowly inside the store."
The store, as it turned out, was the Foot Locker, and as Ms. Su made it inside, holding onto the doorknob for support she was so weak, she began to feel really ill and "I called: 'Save my life!' and someone came" to comfort her.
She had been shot twice, once in the back of her right calf, once in the side of her ankle; she later had two operations and took two years to fully recover.
On the other side of Yonge, Mr. Turner and his family and Ms. Fung had just come out of the Future Shop when he heard a "couple of pops" that caught his attention, looked in the direction of the noise, and "saw at least one person with a gun, facing south and shooting that way."
It was a young black man, and he was holding the gun above his head, shooting at a slight downward angle, and there was another man, who seemed to be with him, who Mr. Turner now believes was probably trying to pull the shooter away.
He heard three or four more shots ring out, "jumped on top of my son," and they scrabbled behind a parked taxi and waited until the shooting stopped, when someone from the now-defunct Sam the Record Man "gave us a hand signal to go in there."
Ms. Fung saw and heard much the same things as her boyfriend did, but she had once spent time at a shooting range, where she fired different weapons, and was able to better describe the gun she saw: It was not a revolver, she said, but rather the sort that takes a clip in the handle; she suspects it was a 9 mm handgun, because when she fired such a weapon before at that firing range, it was easy to shoot, with a manageable kickback. Anything bigger, she guessed, and a man couldn't have fired it with one hand, held high above his head.
She too took refuge behind a parked cab - there were two parked on the street - when she felt a hand tapping on her shoulder. It was Mr. Turner's mom, and she said they should run to Sam's, where a security man was waving them in.
In her opening address to the jurors last month, prosecutor Kerry Hughes told the jurors that a ballistics expert will testify that no fewer than three guns were fired on Yonge Street that day, and that as many as five could have been fired.
The Oxford Dictionary definition of "at random" is "without a particular aim," fitting in these circumstances. That day, the three shooters - or five - surely weren't trying to wound slight female students or send a lawyer across the street throwing his body over his son or kill Jane Creba. But that's what happened: They were randomized innocents who saw or wandered into a gunfight on Yonge Street.
The trial continues Monday.
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