A week after Doug Ford’s Ontario government passed legislation in early December ordering all supervised injection sites within 200 metres of schools and daycares to close, harm reduction activists did the expected and announced they were taking the province to court.
One of the sites being ordered to close in Toronto, the Kensington Market Overdose Prevention Site, held a press conference and introduced the lawyers who will argue on its behalf that the closure of these sites violates the charter rights of drug users.
This announcement gave the 10 sites across Ontario ordered to close by March 31 a measure of hope. Among these 10 sites is the injection site I live across the street from in the South Riverdale Community Health Centre, on the east side of downtown Toronto.
Whatever lift this litigation provided to injection site missionaries, it lasted exactly nine days until Dec. 19, when a truth bomb from a separate, criminal court case blew harm reduction’s balloon out of the sky.
The crime at the root of this case had been the subject of national headlines since July 7, 2023, when a mother of two was fatally shot after a pair of drug dealers allegedly tried to rob a third dealer outside the injection site and guns were fired. Nearby residents had been complaining for years about the drug dealers around the site, along with rampant drug use, violence, theft and discarded needles, but in the days after the shooting, many of the health centre’s supporters took the position that there was no connection between the death of this mother, Karolina Huebner-Makurat, and the injection site.
This tenuous position lost all credibility on Aug. 14, 2023, when police charged a South Riverdale injection site employee, 22-year-old Khalila Mohammed, with aiding and abetting one of the alleged shooters, Ahmed Ibrahim, in his escape from the crime scene, in addition to obstruction of justice.
When Mohammed entered a plea of guilty to being an accessory after the fact just days prior to Christmas, another bullet may have been fired — this time right through the vital organs of supervised injection sites in Ontario.
The 28-page agreed statement of facts entered as an exhibit by Mohammed’s prosecutors, which I obtained, is a detailed and dramatic illustration of how harm reduction ideology turned on itself, glorifying illicit drug culture at the expense of the families who relied on the two elementary schools and six daycare facilities within 150 metres of South Riverdale’s injection site.
Prosecutors describe how the three men allegedly involved in Huebner-Makurat’s death were all drug dealers who came to the South Riverdale Community Health Centre (in Ibrahim’s case, from kilometres away) to sell to drug users in the parkette beside the site for months prior to the shooting. They joined other dealers who had operated in the parkette since the site opened in late 2017 (the same parkette had no such drug activity prior to then).
Prior to the shooting, Mohammed spent “extensive amounts of time” in the parkette talking to 20-year-old Ibrahim, whom she referred to as Ben, according to the synopsis. Mohammed also communicated with another dealer arrested for Huebner-Makurat’s death, Damian Hudson, prior to the shooting, including by text.
Hudson warned Mohammed not to engage with Ibrahim and other dealers he was competing with. He called them his “opps.” It’s worth noting that South Riverdale, before its site opened, had assured my neighbourhood it would have a “zero-tolerance drug-dealing policy.”
Moments before the shooting, Hudson and Ibrahim were chatting by a bench in the parkette, steps from the site. One of Ibrahim’s drug-dealing accomplices, Ahmed Ali, who police believe fled to Somalia after the shooting, approached Hudson from behind and pistol-whipped him. Mohammed then exited the side door of the site into the parkette, rushing towards the altercation.
According to the statement of facts, Ibrahim grabbed Hudson’s satchel of drugs and cash and ran west. Ali followed him once he was able to get free, and Hudson pursued them. Police found six cartridge casings from the ensuing gunfight — four from Ali’s handgun, and two from Hudson’s, including the bullet that allegedly killed Huebner-Makurat.
Mohammed ran back inside the injection site when shots started to be fired. Not long after, Ibrahim returned to the site’s side door with a grey sweater covering his head and was escorted inside by Mohammed, John Barr, the injection site’s nurse, and a drug user named Leila. Barr provided medical assistance to Ibrahim while Mohammed was at his side as Huebner-Makurat lay dying on the sidewalk outside.
Once Mohammed had provided Ibrahim with a change of clothes, he was escorted out the front door of the health centre by Mohammed and Leila. The three of them walked south the length of my street, Heward Avenue, before Mohammed ordered an Uber for Ibrahim a few blocks away so he could go home to the eastern suburb of Scarborough.
Ibrahim and Mohammed went on to exchange a prolific number of text messages, as Mohammed became a mole for Ibrahim when it came to whether he’d been captured on any of the centre’s security cameras. She also procured Percocet pills for him.
Three days after the shooting, Mohammed told Ibrahim that, during a staff meeting about the shooting, her colleagues said they feared him and his friends, even though there is no evidence anyone on staff ever did anything about this cabal of drug dealers outside of the injection site, literally across the street from two daycares and an elementary school.
The police came calling two days later and interviewed Mohammed. She told them she had no clue who the guy was who had his wounds treated inside the site by nurse John Barr. Mohammed also told police she had no idea how to get in touch with Ben, the drug dealer she was texting non-stop with.
When news of Damian Hudson’s arrest hit the news the next day, Mohammed texted Ibrahim immediately. “That’s crazy,” Ibrahim replied. “Holay [sic] f–k. I’m done for.”
For the next week, Ibrahim’s texts were rife with mentions of “stress and shit” and how a billboard with his face on it was causing him to “bug out.” Mohammed and Ibrahim were now star-crossed lovers, and she tried to calm him not just by assuring him she had disposed of his blood-soiled clothing, but also by renting an Airbnb for them to get away from it all in.
After Mohammed and Ibrahim were arrested a few weeks later, Mohammed provided a lengthy statement to homicide detectives. She continued to lie about not knowing Ibrahim. She also denied having been at the Airbnb with him, even though police surveilled them being there and had the transaction receipts.
While Khalila Mohammed may not be summonsed to appear in person on March 24 and 25 when an Ontario judge listens to arguments from various advocates about how incredibly safe and essential injection sites are for neighbourhoods such as mine, she will nevertheless loom large over the proceedings. For a year and a half, South Riverdale and its drug policy allies were able keep the truth about the site’s cozy relationship with violent drug dealers hidden behind an ideological curtain.
Now that the truth has been unveiled, South Riverdale has acknowledged in two recent meetings that its injection site will close regardless of the outcome of the litigation brought by the Kensington site. Its leaders acknowledge that the social contract with its neighbours has been decimated and the health centre’s reputation has suffered significant damage.
As one judge considers whether it’s a violation of drug users’ charter rights to be denied safe injection sites within 200 metres of schools and daycares, Khalila Mohammed will appear before a different judge on March 28 for her sentencing hearing.
National Post