Carys Mills and Jill Mahoney - Police are searching for a teenaged suspect while appealing for witnesses to a shooting inside Toronto’s Central Technical School.
The gunfire happened Thursday as three youths were in a stairwell at the downtown high school when one became involved in a confrontation with a fourth teen, police said.
All four boys ran, but two were later arrested at the school. The youths were later questioned but were not charged.
On Thursday evening, a third boy was located. Police initially believed he was a suspect but said on Friday that he was a victim and the intended target.
The suspect is described as 17 or 18 years old, black, 6’ tall with a medium-skinny build.
Both the two youths originally questioned and the victim are not current students at the school, said Toronto District School Board communications co-ordinator Kelly Baker.
She could not confirm whether they had ever attended the school but said the three youths were in the building on a school-related matter, which she said she could not disclose.
“They weren’t intruding,” she said.
She could not confirm whether they had signed in at the school’s office.
The shooting happened as students were getting ready for their annual Terry Fox Run.
Many students were on the field when the high school near Bathurst and Harbord went into lockdown just after 1 p.m. They were quickly moved to the school’s gym by run organizers and hall monitors, said principal Sheryl Freeman.
Two teams of police officers, who happened to be at the school for the run, helped usher students into classrooms and the library.
Sarah Karim, 17, was on her way back from lunch when a group of males came running down the stairwell, shoving her and her friends out of the way.
The Grade 12 student said she thought “it’s just fooling around or something.” She wasn’t worried by the lockdown either, assuming it was a drill. But 20 minutes later she heard a shell casing had been found.
“That’s scary, that they ran by us,” said Ms. Karim, adding that she thinks the group consisted of the suspects. She and her classmates were let out of the school at about 4:30 p.m.
Another man who isn't a student at the school sustained a minor injury, but police wouldn't say if he was hurt because of the gunshot or by some other means.
Two Emergency Task Force units, as well as police dogs, went through Central Tech searching for the weapon, believed to be a handgun, and a third suspect. Police were also reviewing the school’s security videos.
Two nearby schools, King Edward Public School and Harbord Collegiate Institute, were in a less serious form of lockdown while police conducted their search.
Constable Tony Vella said the incident is “very serious.”
“Any time there’s a shooting within a school we’re looking at thousands [or] hundreds of students, this is taken very seriously,” he said.
Only a few months ago a mistrial was declared in the shooting death of C.W. Jefferys student Jordan Manners, whose death inspired an inquiry and resulted in police officers being stationed in the city’s secondary schools.
City Councillor Adam Vaughan agrees the shooting, which came on the heels of a double-homicide by gun fire in the city’s west end last night, is worrying.
“There are a lot of young people in the city who think if they have a gun tucked in their belt, they’re suddenly safe,” he said.
However, he and Annie Kidder, executive director People for Education, say that metal detectors and tight security at schools isn’t the answer. “We have to be careful of an instinctive reaction to lock schools’ doors,” said Ms. Kidder.
She said having more adults in schools who can reach students before “this type of trouble” is what’s important.
Parents waited anxiously outside the school for hours.
Michelle Alcaidinho waited for hours to see her daughter, Samantha, and relied on text messages to know she was okay.
She started to cry as she ran to hug her Grade 10 daughter after the lockdown.
“Somebody was saying it was three-and-a-half hours of lockdown, it seemed like a lifetime,” she said. “But she’s here now.”