“Something’s wrong. Come quick,” my wife called me. “There’s an active shooter at Salsa on St. Clair.” What? But our daughter’s there.
We called her in a panic. I kept watching short videos of young people running away from St Clair. But she wasn’t picking up.
When she finally did answer, she told us she had been delayed at her friend’s house and didn’t make it to St. Clair.
Huge relief.
Then the phone calls, one after the other. My mother. My brother-in-law. Our friends. Anyone who would have been at the festival. “Are you ok?”
We were worried for one another, and heartbroken for the people who were killed and wounded.
The Toronto police initially said there was an active shooter at the festival. An active shooter is someone who uses a firearm to kill people indiscriminately. Anyone who was there would have been a target.
Two people were dead, and five were injured.
Why would anyone do that at a cultural festival?
A week ago, Elon Musk was praising a German vigilante movie where the “hero” kills the entire immigrant family of a young rapist: father, mother, sister, brother, and his friends in their apartment.
Musk praised the film and streamed it for free on X for 48 hours. The movie centers on a “real American” hunting down criminal immigrants in Europe.
Musk said of the movie, “This is what people want to see.”
I knew there would be people who would listen to Musk, watch the film, and act it out. I told my wife there would be violence in Toronto this summer.
I just didn’t think it would be so close to home.
The shootings on St.Clair felt like my fear was coming true: Torontonians turning against each other. This is, after all, a cultural festival and the revelers were immigrants. I feared that people had started believing what Musk was dishing out and taking violent action.
But police later updated the story. There wasn’t an active shooter. It was a shootout between two men at the festival.
The result was the same. People are dead. Wounded. And our community has been left devastated.
And it seems that my fear wasn’t true.
But will it be?
