Community comes together in tragedy
Scarborough high school students pay tribute to classmate they call ‘sweet’ and ‘genuine’
It wasn’t a school day, but the students were still there.
On Friday — a P.A. day — a sombre procession of more than two dozen teary-eyed students filed through the doors of Scarborough’s David and Mary Thomson Collegiate Institute to pay tribute to their classmate, Jahiem Robinson, 18.
Wearing black, holding flowers, wiping away tears, they could be seen hugging each other in grief over a young man who’s being remembered for his kind nature and sense of humour.
After the hour-long memorial service ended, Robinson’s current and former classmates came back outside and released balloons into the air, spelling his name: “Jah.”
“He was so sweet, he was so genuine,” said friend Maryam Silim, a recent grad. “He would always go out of his way to help others.”
Every Toronto school is a community, but the community of Scarborough’s David and Mary Thomson C. I. had barely had time to get to know itself before it was shattered Monday with Robinson’s shocking shooting death. The brand-new school had only just opened in December 2019. There hadn’t even been time yet for a welcoming open house, delayed due to COVID-19.
Speaking to the Star in the days since Robinson’s killing, members of the David and Mary Thomson community have described how they had been looking to their new school as a beacon of hope and unity in a burgeoning neighbourhood. Instead, this week, students, parents, teachers and school administrators are picking up the pieces after tragedy.
When it opened on the eve of the pandemic, the four-storey facility — a gleaming new structure at the end of Brockley Drive in central Scarborough — united two older high schools: the old David and Mary Thomson C. I. and the former Bendale Business and Technical Institute.
In the past, community members say, these neighbouring schools had their issues, including fights, stabbings and a previous shooting. But the new school was meant to be a new chapter of sorts, both for its nearly 1,300 students and the wider community.
Amaan-Ali Ladak, 18, met Robinson at a 2017 summer program for incoming Grade 9 students to the old David and Mary Thomson C.I. Ladak didn’t know anyone at the school, but Robinson was “a very happy, very jolly guy,” so they became friends.
“Everyone has arguments sometimes. But with him, he never really upset anyone that much,” remembered Ladak.
But there were incidents at the old school. Ladak recalls in particular when two teens were stabbed and suffered minor injuries during a fight that occurred off the school property in January 2019.
“It was around lunchtime and I was upstairs on the second floor of the old school in the academic resources office. That’s when our vice-principal announced the lockdown and we had to sit in the corner,” Ladak said, adding he remembered several lockdowns at the old school.
Two years earlier, three teen boys were stabbed nearby, leaving one in life-threatening condition and the two others with serious injuries. At least one of the victims, a 17-year-old boy, was a student at the school.
The most significant incident before Robinson’s killing happened at Bendale Tech in 2008, when a 16-year-old student was shot in the abdomen in the parking lot. He survived.
Scott Harrison, who was the school trustee between 2000 and 2010, remembers that 2008 shooting. Parents were livid afterwards, he said, with some calling for officials to install metal detectors, something that didn’t happen.
Harrison said both he and the community supported amalgamating the two underused schools under one roof, with better and more resources for students.
The new David and Mary Thomson C. I. — the planning of which started when he was trustee — was to be “bigger, better, brighter,” signalling a “hopeful” change.
When it opened at the end of 2019, it brought new swag, a redesigned logo and even a new slogan reading “one team, one dream” — an attempt to unite the two student bodies.
The effort to build the school “took years of planning and collaboration,” said Deputy Mayor Michael Thompson, who is also councillor for the area.
Thompson, who lives a fiveminute drive from David and Mary Thomson C.I. — the school is named for a pair of the earliest Europeans to settle in what would become Scarborough — emphasized this is not a neighbourhood that is “deficient.” The school, located near Lawrence Avenue East and Midland Avenue, is nestled in a part of the city that is home to many immigrants and young people, and has a lower household income than the city average.
But neighbours have access to services and new facilities and, despite the incidents, the area is not a hot spot for Toronto’s rising problem with gun violence.
Nearby is a community centre, townhouses, apartment complexes, a strip mall and mom-and-pop shops. A brand new midrise condo community is being constructed at Lawrence Avenue East and Midland Avenue, which will include nine buildings in total. And a new daycare facility is in the works.
“It’s not an area that one would look at as being a blighted area,” Thompson said.
Robinson’s killing marks the second fatal shooting at a Toronto high school. In 2007, Grade 9 student Jordan Manners was shot and killed at C.W. Jefferys Collegiate Institute in North York.
Akwasi Owusu-Bempah, an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto who examines race and policing, said violence in Canadian schools remains very rare.
When it does occur, schools are likely the setting because they’re places where large numbers of young people congregate.
“If there are beefs between people … this is somewhere where young people go,” he said, adding if someone is targeted, school may be an easy place to find them.
Owusu-Bempah points to the landmark “Roots of Youth Violence” report to understand the complicated nature of these incidents. Published in 2008, the report emphasized that multitude of factors influence any one act of violence. They include: racism, criminalization, young people’s feelings of being isolated from society, loss of hope, being rejected from the education system through discrimination in the classroom along with suspensions and expulsions, and lack of opportunity.
“We know very well the factors that contribute to youth violence,” Owusu-Bempah said.
So far, police have not said what factors led to Robinson’s shooting death, except to say that it followed a brief altercation.
According to police, Robinson was shot from behind at pointblank range by a fellow student, a 14-year-old boy. Police, who earlier this week described Robinson’s killing as an “execution,” say the young gunman also attempted to kill another student soon after, but his gun did not fire.
The boy has been arrested and is facing charges of first-degree murder and attempted murder.
David and Mary Thomson C.I. school reopened for the first time since the shooting Thursday, but not for classes, which are set to resume Tuesday.
Instead, social workers and grief counsellors were available for staff and students.
“There were a lot of tears and hugs,” said Shari SchwartzMaltz, a spokesperson for the Toronto District School Board.
“They talked about their beautiful building and their relationships with each other. They said it was a family. And that this incident had rocked their family to the core.”