What Killed Jane Creba. Anita Arvast
fix things when people think defence lawyers are about “getting people off,” rather than participating in a system where evidence must be examined and laws must be followed.
Very few of us know what it’s like to spend a night in the hole of a detention centre like the old Don Jail, where feces backed up regularly from sewers into the cells, rats became pets, and two of the three guys in the cell built for one were sleeping on the floor. Yet many of us say “they deserve that” or that “they shouldn’t be credited for their time in detention.” We don’t know what a “call down” is. That will be explained later. It ain’t pretty.
If we could shake those perceptions for a little while, if we could walk a mile in those high-tops, we might get closer to being done with racism, and the violence it leads to.
Millions of dollars were spent on the Green Apple Project. Hundreds of police were assigned to the surveillance. Twenty-five men were arrested in a massive raid in June 2006. Fifty-six men with direct or indirect relation to Jane’s death were arrested in total that year. Almost all of them were African Canadians.
Nine young black men and one “wannabe black” young offender were charged with her murder. The wannabe never made it to trial because they figured out he didn’t actually have a gun. The other white guy who was directly involved that day (and probably had a gun) was never charged. Instead, he became a witness. The majority of men were acquitted because there was no evidence they participated in anything other than being present that day. But many of those eventually acquitted spent four years in jail awaiting trial anyway. The guys who waited in jail were one colour.
Only one bullet struck and killed Jane.
Only one man killed her, and he eventually told the courts that he did it. The cops were never sure which bullet actually killed her. So his admission was key.
One bullet. But four young African-Canadian men were convicted of murder by a prosecution that changed its story at each trial, despite stern warnings from the judge that this wasn’t the way to do justice. These kids definitely had problems and they may have been guilty of a lot of things. But murder?
“Who killed Jane Creba?” is an easy question to answer. It was Jeremiah (Short) Valentine and his .357 Magnum. It was young men with guns from the ghettos. Thugs, as the press made them out to be.
What killed Jane is a way tougher question to answer.
The trials may be done, but the bigger question marks remain.
1
T-dot-O
Rap it everywhere I go.
— Kardinal Offishall, “The Anthem”
Yonge Street. The longest street in Canada. The Guinness Book of World Records recognized it as the longest street in the world until 1999. It starts at Lake Ontario in Toronto before wending its way north through suburbs and, eventually, into the forests and rocky scrapes of Canada’s near north. There, it somehow transforms from Yonge Street into Highway 11, connecting the hubbub of Toronto with the moose of Algonquin Park and the endless frontier of the Canadian Shield, where there are vast skies and virtual emptiness. Most Canadians don’t live the solitude that is the “North,” and which is what most people outside of our country think of when they picture Canada — polar bears, moose, trees, ice, and rocks. But we’re more urban than people think.
Toronto is only about a two-and-a-half-hour drive from the U.S. border. North of Toronto, Canadians own rifles to shoot moose and bears. Close to the border, where most of our population lives, our kids get contraband handguns from the neighbours to the south, who have much laxer gun laws.
Toronto. T.O.,we call it. T-dot-O.
The Zanzibar strip club on Yonge Street is lit up with neon — flashing orange and red signs a hundred feet tall stand over its meagre entrance, trying to seduce people to come inside. It’s probably the place table dancing in Canada originated, and lap dances are cheaply served up by women in spandex ranging in ages and nationalities. Neon is everywhere on Yonge — the open signs at the money exchanges and hole-in-the-wall nail salons and places that offer to unlock your phone. The two-hundred-foot signs that advertise new television shows bounce their reflections off the glass highrises. Everything flashes for attention.
Voices rebound off the pavement and sidewalks — some, the homeless asking for change; some, the outrages of a dispute; some, brazen teens singing in a drunken stupor; most just the idle conversations of people walking to and from the points in their lives. There is a constant white noise of cars travelling, of taxis honking, of subways rumbling underfoot. And about every ten minutes, the sound of a siren echoes as it takes an emergency patient to one of the many hospitals in the downtown core.
Most people don’t bother to pick out the nuances of conversation and noise and light until they are told they need to pay attention. On the day after Christmas 2005, we were told in no uncertain terms.
The cops and newspapers had already decided 2005 was the Year of the Gun in Toronto. There had been way too many gun homicides that year — the heat from the concrete jungles was seeping out into the polished neighbourhoods of the suburbs and the traditional safe zones of the middle class. Gang warfare was out of control. The town was no longer “Toronto the safe,” or “Toronto the Good,” or “Toronto the big city where shit doesn’t happen like it happens in L.A.”
That year there were 70 homicides in the city, 78 potential ones investigated. The year before there had been 60.
In the grand scheme of things, Toronto’s murder rate wasn’t that high. From 1998 to 2007, the homicide rate was 1.8 per 1,000 people. Put in context, Winnipeg’s was 3.2 and Edmonton’s 2.9.[1] Was the city as big and bad as L.A.? Not so much. Their rate was 10 per 1,000. Philadelphia was a whopping 23, and even the quiet retirement city of Phoenix, Arizona was 13.1.[2] Go figure. That’s where many middle-class Toronto snowbirds go to escape winter.
But 2005 still got called the Year of the Gun in Toronto, because of those 70 homicides that year, 52 were by gun, almost double the 27 in 2004.[3] And the kicker was the death of Jane Creba the day after Christmas.
December 26 is a holiday in Canada called Boxing Day. It’s a big shopping day with great deals — people picking up boxes of new stuff. The stores were packed with people as usual that day. And the big Eaton Centre shopping mecca on Toronto’s Yonge Street was, as per its tradition, busting out onto the sidewalks and streets. As dusk approached, pedestrians ruled the roads by the mall; Christmas lights brought the windows to life with their train sets running, glittering gowns flowing, and mechanical elves dancing and making gifts, while the usual neon light continued to flash.
To the east of this shopping hub is a low-income housing neighbourhood called Regent Park. A concrete labyrinth for displaced immigrants and the generally impoverished — almost seventy acres in total, with people just crammed on top of each other. Seventy acres of cells, mostly three-storey, run-down apartments where the inmates could get out if they could only find work that would raise them out of the dependence on socially assisted housing. The average income in Regent Park at the time was half of what the average Torontonian made; 68 percent of residents were considered to live below the poverty line, and there was a significantly higher population of people under the age of eighteen than anywhere else in Toronto. As the U.S. had discovered in cities like Detroit, New York, and L.A., when you cram that many poor people together in that big a space, there are bound to be issues.
Marz was in the Regent Park project housing on Boxing Day. A young man of Jamaican descent who had seen his share of heat in the hood.
The party was on at Elmer’s. Elmer was a nine-to-fiver who Marz had known since infancy. Their buildings were next door to each other. Elmer’s place was a home, as opposed to a hangout — it spoke of the working class, with its mismatched furniture and old appliances. The home had the standard pictures of kids on the fridge alongside their artwork from younger years.
Elmer picked up trash — like junk, scrap metal, and steel — and sold it. Elmer’s mom and pops weren’t really involved with the hood politics.