‘It was an incredible thing she did for us’: After the Toronto shootings, tales of grace on the Danforth

Lee and his family had been walking home from an Italian restaurant on a balmy Sunday evening. It was a nice night for a stroll, but as they were heading east on Danforth Ave., nearing 10 p.m., they heard loud banging sounds. They weren’t sure if they were gunshots, and there was no screaming. Not long after, they saw him. Dressed in black, he walked with an aggression that made them uneasy. He crossed the street toward them, pulled out a gun and started shooting. “Get the hell out of my way,” he screamed.

Lee and his family turned to run, and he thinks that is when he and his mother were shot. The family scattered: they needed to find safety. His sister, who had not been hit, ran to a bar, and Lee and his mother ran to the closest door they could see. It was late. It was a gamble.

“Thank God it was open,” he says.

Ride the subway north from Toronto’s core, and the flashing green lights on the transit map beckon the rider to all points east and west on the Bloor-Danforth line. East has always been the more spectacular ride, when the darkness gives way to the vista of the Don Valley as the subway trundles along the viaduct that made this once hard-to-reach area grow with homes and businesses a century ago. Posters on the subway advertise the coming Taste of the Danforth festival. Chester station, tiled in mint green, is the stop closest to the shooting that left 18-year-old Reese Fallon and 10-year-old Julianna Kozis dead, and 13 others injured.

Read more: Spare some pity for shooter’s family.

Who was Faisal Hussain?

On Sunday night, one troubled man brought a gun to this street, and mayhem and death followed, including his own. The people who live and work on the Danforth rushed to help the wounded, opened their doors to the injured, sheltered the people who fled. In the days that followed, Torontonians continued to offer their time, their hugs, their food, because they needed to do something, they needed to answer back. Some people say they felt it in the air, others saw it in people’s eyes, their actions and their patience. In the wake of devastation, there was kindness up and down the block.

Tanya Wilson, the owner of Skin Deep, told the Star’s Rosie DiManno that she was locking up on Sunday night when a mother and son — that would be Lee and his mom — burst into her basement studio, shouting and crying about a man with a gun.

In the confusion, Wilson wasn’t sure at first if they were connected with the shooter.

“It was all just garbled because we were bleeding and we were shocked and we were screaming,” says Jun Yeop Lee.

Wilson saw their injuries and shepherded them downstairs. They had both been shot in the leg, and were bleeding heavily. Lee says they sat in the tattoo chairs as Wilson gathered her first-aid kit and anything she could find to make tourniquets to stop the bleeding. Lee pulled his tighter as Wilson helped his mother. Wilson locked the door, shut the lights and tried to call 911, but couldn’t get through. Lee says Wilson soon flagged down police, who arrived within minutes and also helped with first aid.

It was traumatizing to see all that blood, Lee says, but Wilson “was calm, pacing back and forth.”

“Later, when the paramedics arrived, they told us we did an amazing job patching the wounds,” he says.

Wilson’s friend told the Star that night: “She’s a hero.”

It was an hour before closing at Demetres Danforth, and Md Ashaduzzaman, 23, had just poured batter into the waffle iron when bullets shattered the window and everyone lurched toward the back of the dessert café. (Md is his official name, a shortened version of Muhammad.) A woman was yelling that her daughter had been shot. Call 911. Help me. Ashaduzzaman moved some chairs to make room for the injured. He crouched beside the young girl.

“Look at me, it’s going to be OK, you’re going to be fine,” he told the girl. She was starting to close her eyes, as if falling asleep. “I was trying to not let her sleep.”

He found out the next day that she had died. Police identified the 10-year-old victim as Julianna Kozis, of Markham. They confirmed that she died in hospital but have not yet confirmed where she was shot.

Ashaduzzaman came to Canada from Bangladesh in 2012. It had been his mother’s dream — once his sister married a Canadian — that his family would come to Canada for a better life. His mother died in 2007, and his father has returned to Bangladesh. Ashaduzzaman and his siblings remain. He isn’t leaving.

He went to high school in Etobicoke, and he’s going to George Brown to study in the computer programmer analyst program this September.

He begins the citizenship application process next month.

“It is my home now.”

Once the gunman began to shoot, people on the Danforth scattered, just like Lee and his family.

At Avoca, a chocolate and ice cream shop near Chester Ave., an employee who was closing up sheltered 10 or so people who came rushing in. He hid them in the basement.

“That’s what anyone should do,” says Simryn Fenby, who owns the shop along with her mother. “You don’t know how you’re going to react in a situation like that, so I’m really proud that he thought to immediately turn off the lights, close the blinds and offer shelter.”

The store reopened the next day. On Tuesday, a woman brought flowers, Fenby says.

Clay Shirt went to bed earlier than usual Sunday. The father of three and longtime Danforth resident was the good kind of exhausted, one day back in the city after three weeks of running a camp for Indigenous youth, to help them reconnect with their heritage. When he heard loud bangs outside his home, he thought it was fireworks. What kind of idiot would do that so close to the house? he wondered as he walked towards his porch. When he realized it was a shooting, he says he just reacted.

He figured it was a drive-by, and maybe he wouldn’t have run into the street had he known. (“Yes you would have,” his wife says.) He and a neighbour quickly focused on a young woman near the fountain at Alexander the Great parkette, later identified as 18-year-old Reese Fallon.

She had been shot, and wasn’t talking. He took off his shirt to apply pressure to her wound, while a neighbour performed CPR. His wife, Linda Falagario, held the young woman and kept talking to her. She told her she was loved. They kept working, waiting for paramedics and police — “It seemed like it took forever,” he says. He remembers the people coming upon the scene, realizing something terrible had happened, people with ice cream cones, a woman in a red dress, a man on a Segway.

Clay and Linda have three children. They’re not religious, but deeply spiritual. All life is sacred. They are thinking constantly of Fallon’s family, the 10-year-old girl who died, and everybody who was hurt.

They were people helping people, they both say, a pot of basil between them on their front porch. Just two parents. “We did what we could,” he says.

“We’d like the parents to know that she wasn’t alone,” Falagario says.

The shooter was identified as Faisal Hussain. His family has pointed to his longstanding mental health issues, but police have not yet determined a motive. Shirt said systemic issues like poverty and mental health need to be addressed for real change. He sees empathy in the aftermath of the shooting, but he hopes that feeling stays with people, that it penetrates their hearts. But hope is a word he doesn’t really like. Too passive. He wants action from politicians and government.

The day after the shooting, longtime Danforth resident Tina Tassiopoulos was heading home from Broadview station when she noticed two women sitting on the steps of the bank, alongside a fluffy white dog and a pug, both with permanent dog grins. They had a sign: Free dog therapy.

“I love dogs, so of course I took them up on that offer,” she says. They handed her a chocolate bar taped to a note, and when Tassiopoulos opened it later, she found a Tim Hortons card inside. She passed it on.

The women just wanted to help, and it was the same thing at the Auld Spot Pub, she says. Tassiopoulos and her husband went searching for a place that was open the night after the shooting. The pub was technically closed, but staff brought in pizza for everyone to share. At the nearby Joy of Dance studio, drop-in-classes were free. Jennifer Lambert Jones wanted to encourage people to come back to the Danforth, and the safe, transformative space that dance can provide.

Many of the Danforth’s restaurants reopened Tuesday. Ed Ho, the owner of Globe Bistro, wanted to do something for the people who returned that first day. He didn’t put any notice on social media. His servers gave happy-hour customers a $25 gift card at the end of their meal.

All along the Danforth, places of worship opened their doors.

“We felt like it was important to do that because the shooting happened right in our neighbourhood and we know that people are hurting and looking for a space to gather,” says Rev. Sarah Miller of Eastminster United Church, who hoped the church would offer “a sense of connection” to people, so they wouldn’t feel alone.

She says the Danforth community also wants to highlight that “gun violence is happening in other neighbourhoods, where there’s a different demographic,” and she notes that other communities haven’t received such a widespread outpouring of empathy.

“We stand in solidarity with all victims of violence.”

Sarah Kiriliuk had wanted to organize a run a few years ago after a violent incident in the neighbourhood, but after Sunday’s shooting, she decided this was the time. “Does anyone want to run the Danforth with me tomorrow night at 10:00 p.m?” she posted. “I’m sick of the violence in our neighbourhood and I want to do something.”

They would meet at the McDonald’s near Coxwell — where two men died in a shooting in 2015 — and run west, towards the more recent crime scene. The run would start at roughly the time of Sunday’s shooting.

Kiriliuk figured maybe a dozen people would show. But volunteer medic Matthew Cohen connected on Facebook. He told her he could bring his motorcycle and be the “sweep rider” to make sure nobody was left behind.

“I believe we all feel like we want to do something, we are all grieving,” she says.

The rain stopped an hour before the run. It was a hot, humid Tuesday, and Kiriliuk saw people coming out of Coxwell station in running gear. The crowd grew, to around 150, she estimates. It was the slowest and fastest 2.7 kilometres of her life.

“I want to hold on to that feeling of being solidified as a group,” she says, “taking back our neighbourhood, and demonstrating that we are a strong community.”

At the Alexander the Great parkette on Wednesday, near the spot Fallon was shot, people are eating ice cream, smoking, and some are just sitting, looking at the stuffed animals, the sunflowers dipped in the water, the cords for the news vans snaking across the cement. Stephanie “Stephedelic” Gomes, a shaman healer, is holding a sign, offering hugs. She usually gives out hugs before Christmas to help people combat loneliness, or in old-age homes. She’s never done it in response to violence, but “every week I’m hearing about something new,” she says. “It’s just really sad. This stuff shouldn’t be happening.”

In the half-hour she’s been here, she’s doled out more than a dozen.

“It takes nothing to make people happy,” she says.

Hug 15 goes to a woman, Hug 16 covers a family with two children and for Hug 17, she sees a man smoking a cigarette and asks if he feels like a hug. Nick Boukouvalas nods.

“Very nice,” he says afterward.

“Makes you feel good,” Jenny Katsigiorgi says, sitting beside him.

Wearing blue shirts and holding signs that said “Love for all, hatred for none,” the members of Ahmadiyya Muslim Jama’at were a constant presence at the parkette this week.

Blawal Aleem, a member of the Muslim youth organization, says they came to condemn the attack and show solidarity. He cites Islam’s founder, the Prophet Muhammad: “loyalty to country is a part of your faith.”

“It was actually our duty and responsibility to be there and to be one of the first people who showed up there, to show our support,” he says.

Aleem said many of the Torontonians in his group are immigrants and refugees. “They faced persecution in other countries and when they moved here, they called Canada the greatest country in the world,” he says. “So obviously they want to support Canada in both good times and bad.”

Jun Yeop Lee is sitting in his mother’s drycleaning shop. She is very hard-working and wanted to make sure it was open Monday morning for the customers who rely on their family.

“Mom, we got shot,” Lee reminded her in hospital, but still he and his sister got in touch with the shop’s previous owners, and by the time they were discharged the next morning, the shop was open as usual, with dress shirts hanging in the back. The old owners are helping out until Lee’s mother is better, another quiet act of kindness.

Lee calls them “amazing friends.”

“They are very protective of us,” he says.

Lee says that their injuries were minor compared to the other injuries and trauma people have experienced after the shooting.

“It was quite unfortunate that we got shot, but … it could have been a lot worse.”

He loves the Danforth. It has always felt safe, people have always been kind.

He is hoping for peace, calm and privacy. Once things settle down, he wants to talk to Tanya Wilson.

The tattoo artist has told the media she did what anyone would have done. This week, she was trying to deal with the clean-up and its related costs. The Toronto Sun noted that the city officials are reaching out to her. Lee feels bad that she might take a financial hit for opening her door, for saving their lives.

“Please tell her how grateful we are.”

With files from Rosie DiManno and David Rider