What Killed Jane Creba. Anita Arvast
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Cover
Dedication
Dedicated to the artists who keep it real
so they can foster understanding and hope,
to all the families who have lost their children
at the hands of gun violence,
and to the advocates who are willing
to raise their voices.
Epigraph
Fighting crime by building more jails is like fighting cancer by building more cemeteries.
— Paul Kelly, author
Wish Canada still had the death sentence for the lot of them.
— Comment posted on a story about
the Jane Creba murder trials
Author’s Note
When I first began following the trials of the many young men charged with the killing of Jane Creba on the street outside of the Toronto Eaton Centre on Boxing Day 2005, I was disturbed by what was being reported in the news. Of course, we all wanted to blame the “thugs” — the young men whose parents had come from Jamaica — but the situation was far more complex than what was reported.
To arrive at the writing of this book, I spent years attending the trials, scouring academic journals and media reports, and conducting interviews, in addition to reviewing seventy-five banker boxes of trial files that one of the accused handed over to me. Those files form the bulk of the information I present in this book; they included police notes, wiretaps, forensics, statements of the accused, and statements from informants, in addition to thousands of transcripts from preliminary hearings and the actual trials. These files also included much information that I cannot write about for legal reasons.
Some of the people who were involved directly with this case believed I could add some substance, to tell their stories in a way that is not meant to garner sympathy or provide excuses, but rather, offer a level of understanding in a situation we should not be expected to understand, let alone accept.
The information I was given was not something anyone can easily get a hold of. Many people trusted me by giving numerous interviews. I gave them all the same promise — that I would share their truths.
I hope I have upheld that promise I made.
Index of Characters Directly Involved
Toronto Hoods
Only hoods connected directly to the Creba shooting are shown here.
Introduction
Question Marks
On December 26, 2005, guys with guns drew on each other on one of the busiest streets in Canada on one of the busiest shopping days of the year. The guys who drew the guns were almost all men of colour. The shots shook Toronto and the whole nation to its core as it took the life of a sweet, fifteen-year-old girl who was merely crossing the street in the midst of what all accounts would call a case of rival gangs taking their rivalries to the streets.
In the city that was known as “Toronto, the good,” we had shit to deal with.
Jane Creba. Homicide #78/2005.
Just like that. A number.
She had a gentle smile. She was a grade 10 honours student and star athlete at Riverdale Collegiate. She lived a comfortably upscale life with her remarkably supportive family in Toronto’s primarily Greek neighbourhood. Her home was just a stone’s throw away from some of the major projects in Toronto, where guns were put on in much the same fashion most people would put on underwear. She was from a neighbourhood. They were from a hood.
Jane stole our hearts.
She was a beautiful child.
She was a beautiful child who shouldn’t have died.
Like so many children.
Jane’s shooting created terror, followed by demands that someone step up to prevent another such death. The Green Apple Project, named after Jane’s favourite food, brought massive police raids to fourteen various low-income areas in Toronto, resulting in hundreds of detentions — primarily of young, black men.
The media had a heyday. Because selling news is sometimes about telling us to be afraid, we heard about gangs with guns gone mad. The media and police christened it “The Year of the Gun.” Those reports were somewhat true. That year, nineteen people aged twenty-two or younger died at the hands of guns.[1] Those people wouldn’t really make the news though.
Joan Howard lost her son to gun violence in 2003. She cried out against the contraband weapons coming up from the United States. She cried out against the shooting of her son, whose death elicited very little media coverage.
The Toronto Star reported at the time, “Howard says Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government is missing in action in making gun violence and its aftermath a national priority. ‘I would never want to wish this kind of pain on anybody but maybe if it came to Harper’s doorstep they would do something.’”[2]
Joan Howard is a black woman. Her son was a man of colour — a youth worker, a basketball coach — shot in the head at his apartment building while on his bicycle.
Two years later, in 2005, the coverage changed. Gun violence became the news.
Jane Creba’s death forced us to pay attention. That attention was focused on the incident itself, as opposed to the underlying causes … but that’s what most of us who open a newspaper, turn on the news, view our tweets, or check out the latest on our computers want. We want digestible pieces. Instead of being encouraged to dig deeper, we want to be “in the know.” The media would deliver what we wanted. That message was easy: be scared of every young, black guy living in projects in Toronto because they were all part of gangs. Crips or Bloods. They fell short of using the N-word, because that would be politically incorrect. So we just heard this: rival gangs.
On the tenth anniversary of Jane’s death in 2015, the Toronto Star published an article about how right the police got it.[3] The article cited police as being content that they set a precedent — four men in total were convicted for her death (two for murder and two for manslaughter), but only one bullet hit Jane, and only one man fired the bullet that killed her. The Toronto Star called it “The Jane Creba Effect” — four convictions for one bullet. And one of the men charged never even fired a gun. They were all black. We were told they were all “thugs.”
They were allegedly all part of gangs.
You got time for a story?
The media did.
The N-word is a highly politicized term that some people have said ought never be pronounced. Political