Friday, December 17, 2004
THEY HAVE A PROBLEM IN TORONTO
The Toronto Sun reports:
The young people responsible for the wave of swarmings and violent attacks that have left three GTA teens dead in two weeks are "out of control and accountable to no one," Toronto's police chief said last night. "Counting the bodies as we do is simply not adequate," Julian Fantino said last night after a community meeting at East York Collegiate Institute, the school Drew Stewart attended before his death at the hands of a youth mob.
"We have to find out why, at the most minor confrontation, weapons are brought out. Why there's this pack mentality," Fantino said, stressing that the large majority of kids are still hardworking, upstanding citizens who do not deserve to be "blackballed."
"But there's an element of young people that are, in fact, out of control and accountable to no one," Fantino said. ...
There is more to the story. One of the "swarmings" took place in the early afternoon in a wooded area near a high school. Thirty students armed with gold clubs, baseball bats, rakes and sticks attacked six students. The article doesn't offer a motive.
"We've never had anything like this happen before," said Francis Libermann Catholic high school principal Tracey Parish. "It's unbelievable."
Toronto Catholic District School Board spokesman Emmy Milne said the six students, all in Grades 10 and 11, were returning from lunch when they were swarmed.
An unrelated swarming took place on Wednesday in which two were stabbed and one bludgeoned. Police have four suspects under arrest and are searching for six others.
A sixteen-year-old was stabbed to death while trying to protect a pregnant friend.
