What Killed Jane Creba. Anita Arvast
groups of poets who had affiliations with other poets trying to get out of a ghetto through their music. Being a hip-hop artist required artistry — an ability to play with words and ideas. Almost all of the guys there on Boxing Day had tried to play with poetry at some point. Had tried to rap. Who would ever think that poetry could cause rivalries? But it did.
In 2005, Short was living in Regent Park. But he had grown up in an area northwest of downtown called Jane and Finch. It’s an area of social housing most notorious for being the riskiest place in Toronto for a child to grow up. Innocent people had been killed walking down the street or just hanging out with friends. Jordan Manners, a fifteen-year-old boy who lived and went to school there, was the first person to be shot inside a high school in Toronto. William Appiah was just hanging out on a basketball court when he was shot down. Parents often didn’t know if their kids would make it home, or whether their kids were into the gang and drug scene or not. If their boys had been pulled to the periphery of the thug life by the glitter of gangs and money, chances were a lot higher that they wouldn’t see them turn into men.
Directly south of Jane-Finch, on the other side of the 401, is the Black Creek area. At one point as a young adolescent in junior high (grades 7–9 in those days), Short had also lived in the projects there. It is a pretty big area stretching from Jane and Lawrence down to Keele and Rogers, and as far east as Dufferin. A particularly heavy area for low-income housing was a street called Martha Eaton Way (originally a set of high-profile condominiums for professionals, but now worn down, slummish apartment buildings), but since that area was short on amenities, most of the Black Creek boys gravitated to Dufferin and Eglinton for action, and sometimes crossed into the territory of Jane-Finch or headed south into the downtown core.
Here’s the thing about hoods and gangs. They are more liquid than solid. Mostly, they are make-believe. We might have a map that roughly shows where crime is pronounced. But it’s really only a map showing where socially assisted housing exists.
Most of the people who live in these hoods are hard-working folks just trying to get food on the table and keep the hydro on while working a minimum-wage job — sometimes two. They’ve escaped some hardships, but not all.
These main hoods in Toronto are home to a substantial number of recent immigrants. Of course, that’s an aspect of systemic discrimination and segregation (no longer mandated, but still a reality) that is difficult to address. How do poor people get into housing and out of these “ghettos” that thugs try to reign? That’s a mighty big hole to climb out of.
There have been lots of efforts to “fix” the problems in all of these areas. Sometimes that means community groups working with police. In extreme cases, it means efforts to gentrify.
In 2014, the University of Toronto released a report on the demolition and resurrection of Regent Park, citing it as an ideal opportunity for “Social Cohesion in a Contested Space,” which is the title of the report. It states:
Regent Park is Canada’s oldest and largest social housing project and is currently undergoing a fifteen to twenty year revitalization process. Since the 1940s and 1950s, when Regent Park was first redeveloped from “slum” to social housing project, the neighbourhood garnered a stigmatized reputation for high rates of crime, poor social conditions, and physically isolating infrastructure. In 2005, Toronto Community Housing Corporation (TCH) initiated a process of redevelopment in partnership with private developer Daniels Corporation to transform the neighbourhood into a mixed-tenure, mixed-income community. Regent Park will no longer consist entirely of social housing units, instead, the residential make-up will be roughly 70% market rate units and 30% social housing units once the redevelopment is finished. The physical transformation of the neighbourhood is happening alongside coordinated efforts to facilitate the social integration of new and old residents to ensure a cohesive environment for all Regent Park residents.[1]
It’s all well and good for planners and academics to discuss the future of the area, but in 2005, Regent Park was 100 percent socially assisted housing with a considerable reputation. It wasn’t all bad, and there were a lot of efforts to promote a positive sense of community. But none of the efforts were on the scale of the plan that eventually would come into place and yet solve only some of the problems while simultaneously displacing many people who relied on socially assisted housing to keep a roof over their heads. And people who actually called this home, and called their neighbours their friends.
In north Regent Park, Point Blank rapped that they came “from a park where we don’t play.”
In south Regent Park, the Silent Souljahs were rapping about “working it out.”
Most of the OG’s (original gangsters) knew rap was about the systems they were fighting rather than the individual rivalries or people in various neighbourhoods. The older guys also had respect for authority, parents, and family. And they respected what police called the G-code. It was a code that Short wasn’t following. It was a code that Marz and Boy would eventually be expected to break.
What’s the G-code? Unwritten rules about taking care of your people, especially if you lived in one of these hoods. The G-code isn’t really “gang code,” as the police and media describe it; it’s an understanding amidst a group of minoritized people who fear authority because of their own bad experiences — particularly with racial profiling — but still respect police authority as a necessity in dangerous areas and times. And the G-code is like any code of brotherhood — whether it’s police brotherhood, army brotherhood, or biker brotherhood.
One of the unwritten rules revolves around snitching; it’s a big no-no. That works fine when the G-code is taking care of you, but if you’re suddenly facing trouble, it might be easier to talk to the cops than end up serving time. But snitching leads to a lot of heat in the hoods. Something Short knew about as a target for his own snitching. And he wasn’t the only one breaking the G-code.
One of the guys being snitched on was Christoff “Creedy” Lewis from Regent Park. Seems some of the thugs didn’t have a problem pointing the finger at him for whatever reason. Less heat? A sense of justice? Not sure.
Creedy was the fellow who led another man named Kerlon Charles to a vacant apartment in a building quite a ways from Regent Park. Kerlon thought he was going there to buy a gun; Creedy knew otherwise. Kerlon was beaten with pool cues, then one of the six or so attackers took a TEC-9 semi-automatic and shot Kerlon eleven times in the head and torso as he lay face down on the floor. It was one of the first homicides in Toronto in 2005. A cold, calculated kill.
It was a while before Creedy got tied to that case and convicted of second-degree murder. Before the police made that connection some five years after Kerlon’s death, Creedy had shot a guy named J9 seven times in the back. He eventually got charged for that as well. J9 was Jermaine Osbourne, allegedly present at the Boxing Day shooting of Jane and shot just a couple of weeks before the big raids would come down in relation to the Creba case. His family celebrated his twentieth birthday in the hospital with J9’s brand new baby girl. But J9 wasn’t celebrating. He was in a coma and died just six days later. He never made it to trial for the Boxing Day events.
Before that all happened, Creedy was doing some introducing of guys in Regent Park. Guys who could sell drugs. It seems Marz’s brother met Short through Creedy. Creedy was a kingpin in the Regent Park area. He was the reason there were shootouts in the many years leading up to the Year of the Gun. Marz called Creedy “the original victim” up in the upper echelons of the Silent Souljahs rap group because he would “big them up” by playing their music when he DJed in the clubs (as opposed to playing the music of Point Blank). He was likely the key reason any rivalries had started, simply because he didn’t play the music of another rap group from Regent. Creedy called himself a “Blood.” Whatever that meant.
Marz’s brother was a rapper with the Silent Souljahs. But Marz didn’t see himself as belonging to any “side.”
Hard to play it neutral as it turned out, and 2005 was definitely a year when you couldn’t just sit on the fence. Seems Marz picked his side the day he was seen outside wearing a Silent Souljahs T-shirt in the fall. A couple of the Point Blanks didn’t like that.
“What the