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 Sansha Joseph's aunt holds a picture of her nephew, Remy, 18, who was gunned down while waiting for a bus in downtown Toronto. (Tamara Cherry /Sun Media) |
TORONTO - Another young man killed on a west-end street -- the third in less than two weeks.
Sansha Joseph stepped off a bus yesterday with tears rolling down her cheeks.
It was the bus her nephew was waiting for to get home Friday night after watching TV at a friend's Dundas St. W. apartment, west of Scarlett Rd.
But moments before that bus arrived, while Jarvis St. Remy stood alone, two people approached him, shots rang out, and the 18-year-old never-to-be high school grad was left for dead at 10:45 p.m.
Six years after St. Remy came to Toronto from Saint Lucia with his mother and younger brother, his aunt remembered him as a family boy who adored basketball, aspired to be an engineer and didn't leave home enough to have enemies.
"He never bugged anybody," she said. "My nephew, he never went out."
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His friend's place on Dundas was an exception.
"He (St. Remy) is like my second son," the friend's mother, Joanne Wilson, said. "He was very mannerly, kind, generous, no trouble at all."
It was routine for the pair to leave Western Technical-Commercial School, where St. Remy was set to graduate next month, and head to Wilson's apartment for some TV, food and video games, she said.
For family and friends contemplating the city's 16th murder of the year, a case of wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time mistaken identity was all they could surmise.
"He only comes here to visit the boy," an area resident said. "He doesn't hang around outside."
The woman was sitting on her patio behind the bus shelter when St. Remy was shot.
"It's not even like there was an argument. There were no words said. It was just bang, bang, bang," she said.
With those bang bang bangs, the beat went on for west-end murders.
Daniel Lewis, 19, was gunned down in a laneway near Rogers Rd. and Keele St. around 6:30 p.m. on April 21. A day later, 29-year-old Omar Waite was fatally shot at a bus stop near Jane St. and Eglinton Ave. W.
"These guns need to get off the street now," a friend of St. Remy's said, standing over a makeshift memorial. "They're killing good people."
"I watch it everyday on the news. I never thought it would happen to my family," Joseph said.
"It's just the next black kid dead," she scoffed. "They (society) probably think it's all drug-related or gang. It was nothing like that. He was a good boy."
Anyone with information is asked to contact police at 416-808-7400 or Crime Stoppers anonymously at 416-222-8477, 222tips.com, or by texting TOR and your message to 274637.
TAMARA.CHERRY@SUNMEDIA.CA