The second day of 2024 set the year’s sour tone like an out-of-tune tuba.
It was a domestic, murder-suicide at an apartment in the Bathurst St-Baycrest Ave. area. Cops theorized that the woman — whom they never identified — punched 28-year-old Mert Sozdinler’s ticket before topping herself.
That was Jan. 2, 2024. Things didn’t get much better.
Another homicide that month fit nicely into the year’s overall theme. Trix are not apparently for kids but knives and guns are.
Scott Robert Partington, 35, was stabbed to death on Jan. 6 downtown. His alleged killer? Just 16 and charged with manslaughter, possession of a prohibited weapon and in another of 2024’s greatest hits, fail to comply.
There were 85 homicides in Toronto in 2024, up from the 73 recorded in 2023. It will almost certainly get worse in 2025, driven by many of the same factors that triggered a spike in 2024.
Guns. Easy bail. Light sentences. Immigration. The Youth Criminal Justice Act. Drugs. The list is endless.
“We arrest them, they get bail, then we arrest them again, then they get bail again, then we arrest them again. We’re arresting some of these guys numerous times,” one cop told me.
“Most of them are incredibly stupid.”
Remember: The Liberals aided and abetted by the Supreme Court of Canada (why do people say mean things about us?) ditched mandatory minimums. For good measure, they kicked sentence stacking for murder to the curb. Kill one? Get one, two, three, four more for free!
The Supremes said stacking sentences was … “cruel and unusual.”
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Sometimes two of the deadly toxins that frequently formulate homicide are present. That is youth and guns.
That happened on June 2 when five men were shot in the parking lot of North Albion Collegiate Institute while they had the temerity to play dominoes. Delroy “George” Parkes, 61, was dead at the scene.
Three days later, Seymour Gibbs, 46, joined his friend in death.
Cops say the triggerman is a 14-year-old male, poised for boffo street cred in another five years. He was charged with two counts of first-degree murder and seven counts of attempted murder.
A nationwide gang war sent gangbangers to the morgue in the GTA, Alberta and B.C. Fentanyl remains a deadly epidemic, fuelling gang violence and packing emergency rooms.
Most of the crimes and outrages I list are from my 2024 notebooks and are by no means all-encompassing. But they do give you a taste.
IMMIGRATION
The 11-year-old boy slated to die alongside his gangster father. A high-profile Sikh activist rubbed out in B.C.’s Lower Mainland. A family destroyed by a wrong-way driver racing from a liquor store robbery on Hwy. 401. In Ottawa, six people — including four children — were stabbed to death by a tenant.
Terror suspect Muhammad Shahzeb Khan, 20, was also an “international student” mulling the gay gambit to stay in Canada as a refugee. But cops say his real purpose was to unleash slaughter on New York’s Jewish community. That would allegedly be his Oct. 7 surprise.
The commonality in all of these horrors is that in every case, an international student is accused. None of the charges have been proven in court. How in hell did these people get into the country? How did they slip past the scrutiny of Canada Border Services?
BUT DON’T WORRY
A goofball study from researchers at the University of Toronto and the Upstream Lab proclaimed there is no “consistent correlation” between more cops on the street and less crime. No, really.
This was the kicker: “Although we do not make specific policy recommendations regarding police budgets, our findings raise questions about the reasoning for such vast differences in police funding across the country despite overall downward crime rates” (emphasis mine). Huh?
OH, SCAM-A-DA
Canadians could be forgiven if they took their criminal cues from Ottawa. Led by bureaucrats and light-fingered consultants, our public treasury has been raped and pillaged in an orgy of parasitical feasting. See the ArrivScam Bros.
Convicted fraudster Karima Manji, of Mississauga, pleaded guilty to fraud in Iqaluit. Even in a nation of cheats, Manji’s scam was pretty outrageous. The crook registered her daughters as Inuit, leading to big money grants. She even said a dead woman was their birth mother.
THE KINDLY JUDGE
Calgary Judge Anne Brown fretted at the plight of poor Rajbir Singh, 25, accused of groping a woman’s genitals at a Cowtown watering hole. Then, he did it again.
The “international student” was found guilty of sexual assault but Social Justice Brown agonized that a conviction could get Singh deported. Brown tossed in a discharge, so there would be no permanent criminal record when it came time for said appeal.
SECOND MURDER IS FREE
Two-time killer Donald Musselman should be sending flowers to the Supreme Court of Canada. In the normal world, the 23-year-old Ottawa thug would be locked up forever with second-degree murder and manslaughter convictions (to be served consecutively) stacked to the rafters.
In May 2022, the nine justices (so say we all!) on Canada’s top court overturned a 2011 Criminal Code provision that allowed judges to impose parole ineligibility periods of 25 years to be served consecutively for each murder. “Cruel and unusual punishment,” they sniffed.
SOME GOOD NEWS
Millennial Bonnie and Clyde — Oliver Karafa and Yun Lu (Lucy) Li — were convicted of first-degree murder and attempted murder in a 2021 double shooting in Stoney Creek. Cocaine dealer Tyler Pratt, 39, was dead at the scene while his fiancee, Jordyn Romano, survived a bullet wound. She was pregnant and lost the baby.
Li and Karafa were both dealt automatic life sentences with no chance of parole for 25 years.
@HunterTOSun