Andreas Mantzios was on Danforth Avenue Sunday night when a gunman began firing at pedestrians and into cafes. Mantzios says he saw a woman gunned down and people were screaming to get down.
Andreas Mantzios had grabbed a coffee and a seat by the fountain at a parkette off Toronto’s busy Danforth Avenue when a night of midsummer ease along one of the city’s most popular streets came to an abrupt end.
He heard a burst of gunfire a few metres away and looked up to see a tall, slim man dressed in black with “a horrible expression on his face” shooting into a group of people waiting to cross the street.
As people tried to run away, a young woman tripped and fell. “He turned around and shot her point blank,” Mr. Mantzios recalled.
The gunshots, unleashed around 10 p.m. on Sunday, would mark the beginning of a lone gunman’s four-block rampage in the city’s Greektown that would leave two victims dead and 13 injured.
The gunfire woke up Cliff, a father of three who lives just north of the Alexander the Great Parkette on Logan Avenue. As he headed outside to investigate, Cliff, who asked that his last name not be used, noticed the woman who had been shot lying bleeding and motionless on the ground. He took his shirt off and tried to put pressure on her wound as a neighbour started chest compressions.
The CPR seemed to work at one point. “We brought her back and my wife came and started saying, ‘You’re not alone. Somebody loves you.’ And then she was gone. We tried to save her but we couldn’t,” Cliff said.
Friends later identified the woman as Reese Fallon, an 18-year-old who had just graduated from high school and had been attending a birthday celebration with friends on the Danforth.
Related: Toronto shooting victim Reese Fallon was to study nursing at McMaster University in fall
Opinion: The Danforth shooting has shattered a community’s illusion
Meghan Wilson-Smith, who was breastfeeding her one-year-old son, also heard the gunfire from her open bedroom window on Logan Avenue. She tried to huddle on her bed, covering her baby’s head with her hands, as she heard people running up her street pleading with strangers to give them shelter. “Please let us in, there’s someone with a gun!” A neighbour let several people in.
I felt the vibrations of the gunshots on my hands on my floor.
— Claire Hunter was playing guitar in her second-floor apartment across the street
Just east of the parkette, Jody Steinhauer was celebrating her birthday with family and friends at Christina’s restaurant when she heard a series of at least eight to 15 piercing bangs. She thought they were firecrackers until someone yelled: “Get down!”
About 20 patrons huddled underneath tables or on the floor at the back of the restaurant. Then they heard someone scream, “Help me!”
Laurie Gutmann, Ms. Steinhauer’s boyfriend, went outside and found a woman who was bleeding, dragging her in the restaurant with the help of one of the employees. They placed her on a bench at the entrance and Mr. Gutmann yelled: “Is there a doctor?” There was and the physician quickly went to work tending to the woman, who had been shot in the thigh.
Meanwhile, Ms. Steinhauer and restaurant staffers tried to call 911, but the line was busy. So she tweeted at the CP24 television station to report the shooting. It was 10:03 p.m.
MASS SHOOTING IN
TORONTO’S GREEKTOWN
Toronto year-to-date shootings*
Neighbourhood boundary
*As of July 19, 2018
TORONTO
Lake Ontario
Demetres:
Shooter opens fire on cafe
Alexander the Great Parkette: Victim shot
Shooter found dead
ARUNDEL AVE.
CHESTER AVE.
M
Danforth Church
Chester
Station
DANFORTH AVE.
HAMPTON AVE.
BOWDEN ST.
LOGAN AVE.
Police exchange gunfire with shooter
Second Cup:
More gunfire
john sopinski and MURAT YÜKSELIR /
THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SOURCE: TORONTO
POLICE SERVICE; TORONTO OPEN DATA;
google maps; SIU
MASS SHOOTING IN
TORONTO’S GREEKTOWN
Toronto year-to-date shootings*
Neighbourhood boundary
*As of July 19, 2018
TORONTO
Lake Ontario
Shooter found dead
ARUNDEL AVE.
Demetres:
Shooter opens fire on cafe
Alexander the Great Parkette: Victim shot
CHESTER AVE.
M
Danforth Church
Chester
Station
DANFORTH AVE.
HAMPTON AVE.
BOWDEN ST.
LOGAN AVE.
Second Cup:
More gunfire
Police exchange gunfire with shooter
john sopinski and MURAT YÜKSELIR /
THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SOURCE: TORONTO POLICE
SERVICE; TORONTO OPEN DATA; google maps; SIU
MASS SHOOTING IN TORONTO’S GREEKTOWN
STEELES AVE. W.
STEELES AVE. E.
FINCH AVE. W.
FINCH AVE. E.
VICTORIA PARK AVE.
SHEPPARD AVE. W.
SHEPPARD AVE. E.
WILSON AVE.
LESLIE ST.
YONGE ST.
KIPLING AVE.
LAWRENCE AVE. E.
KINGSTON RD.
JANE ST.
ST. CLAIR AVE.
DETAIL
Toronto year-to-
date shootings
As of July 19, 2018
THE QUEENSWAY
Shooting
Lake Ontario
Neighbourhood
boundary
ARUNDEL AVE.
CHESTER AVE.
Shooter found dead
Demetres:
Shooter opens fire on cafe
Alexander the Great Parkette: Victim shot
M
Danforth Church
Chester Station
DANFORTH AVE.
LOGAN AVE.
HAMPTON AVE.
BOWDEN ST.
Police exchange gunfire with shooter
Second Cup:
More gunfire
john sopinski and MURAT YÜKSELIR / THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SOURCE:
TORONTO POLICE SERVICE; TORONTO OPEN DATA; google maps; SIU
One block to the west, Demetrios Papadopoulos heard gunfire and looked out the window of his home at the corner of Danforth and Arundel Avenues. He saw a man dressed in black walking calmly carrying a handgun.
He watched as the man stopped, raised the gun and fired toward Pappas Grill, a popular Greek restaurant along the strip, narrowly missing a busboy who had bent down to clean a table a moment earlier.
When Mr. Papadopoulos saw the muzzle-flash, he picked up the phone to call 911 as he watched the gunman continue west, stopping for a brief moment in the middle of an intersection to fire a shot up Arundel Avenue. “He was shooting at nothing, just randomly,” he said.
As Jim Melis drove south on Arundel Avenue approaching Danforth, the gunman crossed the street in front of him and walked west. He watched as the man stopped in front of Caffe Demetre, where he pulled out his gun.
A family of four was seated toward the front of the restaurant sharing one of the café’s specialties, a waffle topped with ice cream. “I was just walking toward the family to ask them how they were doing,” server Diana Avram said. “That’s when I caught a glimpse of a man’s face directly outside and then I saw the window crack and people started yelling ‘Get on the floor!’ ”
A still frame from a video captured and posted on Instagram from the account @ArielAnise shows a young man, dressed in black, raising a handgun on Sunday, July 22, 2018. Police have identified the suspect as 29-year-old Faisal Hussain.@ArielAnise/The Canadian Press
Across the street, Claire Hunter was playing guitar in the window of her second-floor apartment above a bridal shop when she heard the gunshots and saw people running.
“The energy just switched on the street and you could just tell all of a sudden people just started panicking,” she said.
She saw a man holding a gun and ducked. “I felt the vibrations of the gunshots on my hands on my floor,” she said.
Ms. Avram ran downstairs to her manager’s office along with another server and three customers. “They came in and said there was a bomb,” Parsa Abharoudi, manager at the café, said.
Mr. Abharoudi walked out of his office and saw that about 10 more people were hiding in the fridge and other places throughout the basement. When he ran up the stairs, he saw a woman bleeding from a gunshot to the leg. “You could see all the way to the bone and it looked broken.” He grabbed a couple of towels and wrapped them tightly around the woman’s leg to stem the bleeding.
He navigated around several overturned tables to the back of the restaurant where he saw a girl from the family of four lying on the floor with her mother. Her father had been shot in the leg. A nurse who was walking by as the shots rang out came to the girl’s side.
“She didn’t look good,” Ms. Avram said of the girl.
Police later said a 10-year-old girl died from her injuries.
They just kept telling me to call 911 and everything was so intense that … we were all yelling back and forth at each other. I just kept saying like, ‘You’re okay, relax. It’s okay, relax. Relax, like, you’re fine. You’re going to be fine. Just relax, they’re coming.'
— Tanya Wilson was just about to leave her nearby tattoo shop when two people barged in screaming something about a gun
A block west, Jessica Young was visiting a friend at work at the Second Cup, just west of Hampton Avenue, when she heard a loud popping sound. Three customers who were sitting outside started scrambling and yelling “Get down!”
Everyone dropped to the floor. Ms. Young saw the gunman fire two shots in her direction but no one inside the coffee shop was hit.
At the Auld Spot, a pub a few doors down, Dale Moser mistook the loud bangs for fireworks, but realized what was happening when a woman on the patio screamed for everyone to get inside. About 10 shots were fired six metres away from where they were sitting, he said. It was “pandemonium.”
Everyone – diners, cooks, servers – scrambled to get to the back of the restaurant. And then, Mr. Moser said, there was total silence.
Tanya Wilson was just about to leave her nearby tattoo shop when two people barged in screaming something about a gun. She had heard gunshots but didn’t yet know what was happening outside her doors so she told the strangers to leave.
Then she noticed blood pouring out of the mother and son’s legs and realized that they needed help. She locked the door and turned off the lights and led the frantic pair down into her tattoo studio.
Tanya Wilson, owner of Skin Deep Tattoo Studio, recounts giving first aid to two people who came into her store looking for help after being shot by a gunman on Danforth Avenue, Toronto, on Sunday night.
“They just said, ‘We were walking and this guy’s like … ‘Get the hell out of my way’ and he shot them,” Ms. Wilson said.
Inside, she tried calling 911 but couldn’t get through amid the crush of calls. She tried calming the woman and man down as she grabbed gauze, gloves and other supplies to tend to their wounds.
“They just kept telling me to call 911 and everything was so intense that … we were all yelling back and forth at each other,” she said. “I just kept saying like, ‘You’re okay, relax. It’s okay, relax. Relax, like, you’re fine. You’re going to be fine. Just relax, they’re coming.’”
The man, who Ms. Wilson believes is in his 20s, had been shot in the left calf and was bleeding profusely while his mother’s right knee appeared to have been grazed by a bullet. Ms. Wilson, who was with a friend who was also helping out, used a pair of leggings and a T-shirt as makeshift tourniquets.
Just west of the tattoo shop, the gunman took a short detour south along residential Bowden Street. There he exchanged gunfire with two Toronto Police officers. His body was found 100 metres north on Danforth. He had sustained a gunshot wound.
Investigators have yet to divulge whether he died by suicide or was killed by police.
With reports from Jack Hauen, Nadine Yousif, Molly Hayes and Oliver Moore
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story misspelled Meghan Wilson-Smith's first name as Meaghan.