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  Dana Lee Williams: Mother of Norris Allen’s two daughters. After his death in 2002, she becomes girlfriend of his successor, Tyshan Riley.

  Marlon Wilson: “Like a cousin” to Philip Atkins before he becomes a key Crown witness. Street name: Mardawg

  Jason Wisdom: Member of G-Way and younger brother to Dwight Wisdom. Street name: C.D.

  Malvern Crew

  David Francis: Malvern Crew leader caught on wiretaps talking about Tyshan Riley shooting up Malvern.

  Alton Reid: Malvern Crew leader and intended target of the March 3, 2004, drive-by shooting. Murdered in November 2009. Street name: Ross P

  Dwayne Williams: Malvern Crew leader shot in 2000 in a Scarborough high school. The spark is believed to have ignited the Malvern/ Galloway gang feud. Street name: Biggs

  Victims and Family

  Leonard Bell: Home renovator shot nine times in 2004 drive-by shooting. No gang connections.

  Brenton Charlton: Thirty-one-year-old restaurant manager shot to death in drive-by shooting. No gang connections.

  Omar Hortley: Twenty-one-year-old shot to death in 2004 steps from his home in Malvern. No gang connections. Riley and Atkins charged with his first-degree murder. No trial date set.

  Chris Hyatt/Kofi Patrong: Two teens shot in Malvern in 2004. No gang connections. Atkins and Riley charged with attempted murder. Trial scheduled for April 2011.

  Mark Jones: Teenager hit by numerous bullets in 2004 as he washed a car in the driveway of his mother’s home in Malvern.

  Eric Mutiisa: Malvern gang associate shot to death in 2002. Tyshan Riley charged with first-degree murder. No trial date set.

  Police

  Wayne Banks/Al Comeau: Homicide detectives assigned to investigate 2004 murder of Brenton Charlton.

  Dean Burks: Detective Sergeant put in charge of overseeing Project Pathfinder, a homicide investigation turned gang project.

  Julian Fantino/ William (Bill) Blair: Toronto police chiefs during first and second half of the ’00 decade.

  Darryl Linquist/Roger Caracciolo: Detectives involved in various stages of the Project Pathfinder investigation.

  Kathryn Martin: Investigator for Eric Mutiisa homicide before being appointed first woman in charge of Toronto police homicide squad.

  Lawyers

  Suhail Akhtar: Lead prosecutor at both 2005-2006 preliminary hearing and Charlton/Bell murder trial.

  David Berg: Defence lawyer representing Philip Atkins.

  Patrick Clement: Crown attorney at Charlton/Bell murder trial.

  David Midanik: Defence lawyer representing Tyshan Riley.

  Maurice Mirosolin: Defence lawyer representing Jason Wisdom.

  Maureen Pecknold/Lesley Pasquino/Scott Childs: Crown attorneys at both 2005-2006 preliminary hearing and Charlton/Bell murder trial.

  Judges

  Ontario Court of Justice David Cole: Co-author (with community legal worker Margaret Gittens) of 1996 report into systemic racism in the justice system.

  Ontario Superior Court Justice Michael Dambrot: Presided over Charlton/Bell trial.

  Ontario Court of Justice Paul Robertson: Presided over preliminary hearing for seventeen co-accused in Project Pathfinder.

  GLOSSARY

  Beast/Boydem/Poo Poo/Feds/Jakes/Five O: Police

  Cheese(d): Mad or money

  Chopping: Selling drugs

  Clap ’em up: Shoot someone

  Dump: To kill someone

  Grains/teeth/shells: Bullets

  G-Lock: Glock firearm of any calibre

  Lick you down: To shoot someone

  Maggie: .357 Magnum revolver

  Neen: 9 mm handgun

  OG: Original Gangster or Original Galloway

  Passa passa: Bullshit, gossip

  Ray ray: etc., etc.

  Stizzy man/Burner/Toast/Piece/Strap: Gun

  Talking on the low: Keeping things quiet

  Trees: Marijuana

  G-Way and Malvern Gang Turf

  CHAPTER 1

  Wrong time, wrong place

  On March 3, 2004, the last day of his life, Brenton Charlton drove his mother to her job as a personal support worker looking after residents of a Toronto nursing home. At 31, Charlton still lived at home and was considered a bit of a mama’s boy. Before driving away, he told his mom he loved her and waved goodbye.

  When he returned home, Leonard Bell was there, repairing the weather stripping on the front door of the modest, two-storey house in the Scarborough section of Toronto.

  Bell, then 43, had met Charlton’s mother, Valda Williams, after he emigrated from Jamaica to Canada in the mid-’90s. Both came seeking a better life and, in part, to escape the crime and violence in their homeland, a country with one of the world’s highest murder rates.

  They both came to Toronto. It was considered one of North America’s safest cities, though statistically the chances of becoming a homicide victim jumped substantially for those who were young, male, black, disadvantaged and involved in what the police referred to as the “criminal lifestyle.”

  The Day Everything Changed

  On this Wednesday in March, Charlton was on a day off from his job as the manager in one of the concession stands at the SkyDome. Bell, a skilled tradesman who did home renovations, finished the work on the door and agreed to keep his friend company as Charlton ran some errands.

  Charlton stood six feet tall and had an athletic build after years of playing football, basketball and cricket. He wore his hair closely cropped and, on that day, dressed casually, a pair of corduroys and a fleece jacket over a T-shirt. Bell wore jeans and a light jacket over a grey sweatshirt. He also kept his hair short and had a trim beard. Neither man was wearing a hat.

  They drove in Charlton’s 2002 blue Chrysler Neon to a nearby bank, where Charlton applied for a line of credit. He wanted the money to take his girlfriend to Florida.

  It was after 5 o’clock, nearing sunset, the streets clogged with evening rush-hour traffic as the two men headed for Bell’s apartment. They chatted about a variety of things. Charlton said he was thrilled that his mother, who had never married, had recently started seeing a man with whom she was happy and appeared to have a future. “He was very supportive and looking forward to having him around,” Bell recalled.

  On Neilson Road, as the men approached Finch Avenue, the light turned amber and Charlton, driving in the centre lane, hit the brakes. Bell gently teased him about not trying to beat the red light when he suddenly felt a jolt in his back and pitched forward. “At first, I felt we were being rear-ended, but I kept hearing the continued explosions and realized it was gunshots,” Bell recalled later. Charlton pushed open the driver-side door and stumbled a few metres before collapsing on the hard, cold median. As the Neon began to roll forward, Bell reached for the handbrake. But his left hand was useless. He reached across and used his right hand to bring the car to a stop in the middle of the intersection.

  Toronto pastor Juliete Wallace heard four distinct popping noises as she climbed onto a bus with her fare in hand. She and other passengers stepped off the bus. They saw Charlton, covered in blood, lying face-down on the median.

  Wallace spotted a passenger in the front seat of the Neon with blood running down his neck. She rushed to him and reached inside the shattered window. Bell was conscious and told her: “I’m getting numb. My back. I got shot.” He told her he was dying.

  “I said to him, ‘Hold on, hold on, you won’t die. Keep praying for Jesus to help you.’” Bell asked her to call his family. They prayed together until paramedics and police arrived.

  The Toronto Police Service operated on a computerized dispatch system, assigning an event number to every incident. All calls to 911 are recorded. On March 3, 2004, at about 5:20 p.m., there were several calls about a shooting at the intersection of Neilson and Finch, in front of the Free Presbyterian Church.

  The callers included a Toronto Transit Commission driver who reported that one victim was lying on the road in the intersection an
d a second was inside a Neon with the licence plate AMWX 820. A woman reported seeing a man lying in the road and a black SUV speeding through the intersection. She didn’t get the licence plate number or supply a description of the occupants.

  Surveillance cameras north of the intersection recorded images of what appeared to be Charlton’s Neon being tailed by a black SUV and a silver Chevrolet Impala. Police said later they believed the SUV to be an older model Nissan Pathfinder. But the footage failed to focus on the licence plate or any people in the vehicles.

  By the time police arrived, Charlton was dead. An autopsy would find three slugs had hit him. The kill-shot had perforated his right lung and aorta.

  Bell was rushed to Sunnybrook Hospital, which handles some of the most serious trauma cases in the country. He had four gunshot wounds to his back, two to his left shoulder and what appeared to be two bullet grazes to his neck and head.

  Forensic firearm tests determined that at least two, and up to six, guns were used in the assault on the Neon. But police couldn’t be sure how many shots were fired. Detective Gerry Storbeck collected slugs from the car at the scene, placing wooden dowels into the holes to show the direction of the shots, suggesting they came from behind the Neon. But no shell casings were found. This was not entirely surprising. In some cases, criminals put a sock over a gun so the shells land inside. Alternatively, if a gun were fired from inside a vehicle, the casings would land inside that vehicle.

  Excruciating Pain

  Bell had company that night in Sunnybrook’s busy trauma centre where doctors were treating three other gunshot victims. His fiancée, daughter, and ex-wife arrived to a chaotic scene of other frantic relatives trying to find out about their loved ones. Bell was having trouble breathing—fluid was building up in his lungs—so the doctors inserted a chest tube down his throat without using anesthetic. “I was in excruciating pain,” he said. After undergoing tests and X-rays, he was moved into a room with a police guard posted outside the door.

  Police walk by Charlton’s bullet-riddled Neon on March 3, 2004.

  He would later recall “the look of fear on my younger . . . daughter’s face when she had to come see her father riddled with bullets, lying in a hospital bed and told ‘Your father is in a critical state’; having to see the pain and constant tears in the eyes of my then-fiancée, now my wife, the months of work hours she lost to be by my side all the time without complaint. She suffered many sleepless nights and what seemed like endless crying as she watched me in pain and agony.”

  Bell remained in Sunnybrook for four-and-a-half weeks, during which time his lung collapsed—another chest-tube was inserted—and he developed pneumonia. He didn’t have any surgery until three months later, when doctors extracted two of the bullets. Four bullet fragments remained in his left lung. He would later go to Scarborough General Hospital for a consultation to have them removed. A doctor “looked at me and said, ‘You people are always killing each other.’ I got up, said thank you, and walked out. Never had that surgery.”

  Still, Bell would hang on to his faith in God and country. He credited his survival to prayer. “I’m not mad,” he said years after the shooting. “I trust in God and I’m going to rely on the justice system to make things right.”

  A Gangland Connection

  Bell told police he had no idea why anyone would try to kill him or Charlton. He said he did not see the vehicle that pulled alongside the Neon, or who was in the SUV.

  In the hours after the shooting, police conducted criminal record and background checks on the victims. They were quickly convinced a couple of innocent men had been gunned down.

  “There was absolutely nothing on either of them that showed up or gave us any reason for why they would have been targeted,” homicide detective Wayne Banks recalled years later. He and partner Al Comeau were assigned to the case. The story was on the front page of the Toronto Sun and Toronto Star. The Star ran it under the headline: “We aren’t safe—It’s so frightening,” quoting a woman who lived nearby with her three children. Both newspapers mentioned other recent shootings in Malvern, an area in the northeastern part of Scarborough plagued by gun violence. The cops had no idea who was responsible for the brazen attack.

  “We had no suspect description,” said Banks, and noted that the vehicle description was almost non-existent: all they knew was that it was a black SUV.

  He was instantly struck by the brutality of shooting two people going about their lives, for no apparent reason. The timing—during a Wednesday night rush hour and not under the cover of darkness—also bewildered police. But Banks was certain there was a gangland connection. “It had gang written all over it from the get-go.” Comeau agreed it was a “targeted” ambush, with all the hallmarks of an American drive-by gang shooting. But how could you explain the fact the victims were not in any way connected to gangs?

  Most gang beefs play out over drug turf, or perceived disrespect. Yet the loss of innocent lives, while rare, is not unheard of, as gangs protect their territory and criminal enterprises from rivals with intimidation, threats, assaults and murder.

  A distraught Valda Williams leaving the funeral for her son, Brenton Charlton.

  Both seasoned investigators in their mid-40s, Banks and Comeau knew that any killing related to gang activity would be tough to solve in an environment where “no snitching” was the code of the streets.

  The day after the shooting, police put out a news release that concluded: “Brenton Charlton, Homicide #10 of 2004, and Bell, appeared to have no involvement in any criminal activity or gang-related activities. It is believed that both are hard-working family men and well respected by their friends.” The news release also contained some emotional language, beyond the by-the-book recitation of the facts generally employed by the Toronto Police Service’s public relations department. It said the shootings had “struck this city in the heart.”

  Ten days later, at the Malvern Christian Assembly, friends and family gathered for the funeral. “Oh God, I have nothing left,” cried Valda Williams as she followed her son’s casket out of the church. She was so overwhelmed by grief, she needed family and friends to hold her up.

  “Black people, stand by your youths,” the 600 mourners were told. “If they’re doing wrong, tell them they’re doing wrong.” Charlton never had to be told to do the right thing.

  CHAPTER 2

  Junior and Leo

  In 1989, Brenton Almondo Charlton Junior came to Toronto from Jamaica to live with his mother, Valda Williams, and his mom’s sister Uleth Harvey, who was only three years older than her nephew. Also in the townhouse on Cass Avenue in Scarborough was another aunt and her boyfriend. Williams immediately laid down the law, telling her 17-year-old son: “So many things are happening, you could fall into the wrong crowd. If you’re brought home in a police car, tell them your mother is dead.” A curfew would be followed, house rules obeyed.

  It was not the first time the boy, whom everyone called Junior, had been in Canada. At age five, dressed up in a royal blue suit and standing alongside the flight attendant assigned to mind him, he waved goodbye to his mother and the many relatives gathered at the airport in Kingston, Jamaica. Uleth Harvey remembers that day. “It was a big thing to see him off. Everyone was crying, it was horrendous.” He was going to visit his father, Brenton Charlton Senior, in Hamilton, where he had settled with a new family and worked in construction. He and Williams had had a brief relationship. She was just 17 when she gave birth to their son.

  Brenton “Junior” Charlton, 31

  At the time he first went north, in 1977, Jamaicans were leaving in droves. The Caribbean island was increasingly beset with political strife and violence associated with the drug trade. Many headed to Canada, where the federal Liberal government had laid out the welcome mat. For decades, Canada had traditionally accepted immigrants from countries such as England, Germany, Italy and the United States, with preference given to residents of Commonwealth countries. Once Liberal prime mini
ster Pierre Trudeau opened the doors further, immigrants started coming from the Caribbean, Africa and Asia, changing the complexion of this country.

  Canada, and Toronto in particular, was a popular destination for Jamaicans for a number of reasons, including the relatively short flying time—less than four hours. In the 1950s, the federal government introduced legislation that allowed eligible Jamaican immigrants—mainly women—to work as “domestic servants.” By the ’70s, many of the Jamaicans entering Canada were the children and husbands of the Jamaican women already here. Between 1973 and 1978 some 42,500 obtained permanent resident status—more than doubling the number of arrivals from the previous five years.

  But little Junior was miserable in Canada. “He hated it,” his aunt Uleth Harvey recalled. He found the winter as harsh as the separation from his mother. He cried every day and longed to go home, which he did after about five months. His father, who adored his son, promised to visit regularly and try never to miss the boy’s birthday on November 13. It became a must-attend event on the family calendar, and his parents relished the planning and preparation.

  Back in Clarendon, in southern Jamaica, Charlton and his mother went to live with his grandmother, Elsada Harvey, who still had six of her ten children at home. The family was poor but the house was filled with love.

  Still, in 1982, Valda Williams moved to Canada on her own, leaving her only son behind, settling in east-end Toronto, where she poured all her energy into making a new life: babysitting and cleaning houses, while taking courses at night school. She lived frugally, collected furniture from garage sales in some of the city’s tonier neighbourhoods and reupholstered the castoffs herself. “I never got a cent from the government,” she would boast. Williams sent whatever money she could back home to support her son on the island.