Mississauga man shaken after Toronto police shooting near quiet neighbourhood: 'WHAT THE HECK IS GOING ON?'
· Toronto Sun
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An older man was getting a drink of water when Toronto police cars screamed by his kitchen window, interrupting a quiet night on the outskirts of western Mississauga.
“It was an eyesore last night,” the man, who wished to remain anonymous, told the Toronto Sun on Thursday morning. “The flashing lights in the trees, red and blue. What the heck is going on? (I said to myself).”
One unidentified person is dead after being shot by a Toronto Police officer around The Collegeway and Winston Churchill Blvd. early Thursday morning in Mississauga.
The province’s Special Investigations Unit says the incident happened shortly before 12:30 a.m., after officers located a vehicle that had been reported stolen in Toronto the previous day.
Police allege the stolen vehicle was a Mercedes, and the four occupants tried to avoid capture before driving into Mississauga. Five unmarked police cars were involved in the chase. The remaining occupants of the Mercedes were arrested without incident.
Needing to know
Curiosity got the better of the 82-year-old man, so he dressed hurriedly and walked the approximately 300 paces required to reach the scene near Council Ring Rd. and Delfi Rd.
The man, originally from South Africa, said there was a crowd of people on the scene by the time he reached the area.
“There was one lady shouting,” he said. “One guy stood next to me and said, ‘I can’t believe it, I spoke to him yesterday.’ He was talking to his friends. I was just listening in.”
He termed the area “lovely” when he moved to Mississauga in the 1970s.
Now, he is not so sure.
What does the future hold?
“This sort of behaviour, which is, I suppose, getting bad everywhere … is shocking,” he said. “Every day there is something and you can’t get used to this behaviour. Where are we going? Where is Peel going with this kind of behaviour? It is just not nice, but you have got to live where you have got to live.”
He did mention an incident occurring last week when a resident in the neighbourhood, just “three or four doors down,” was involved with police in some fashion.
Other than that, it has been a quiet area, located not far from the western perimeter of Canada’s seventh-largest city.
“I have never seen this before, and I have never had a problem in this area,” he said. “This was a very strange and nasty incident, which should not have, obviously, (happened). The police followed the car, and that is where the car stopped. And if it wasn’t for the car stopping there, we might not be speaking about this right now. It is obvious it came from an outside source to our location.”
He says he has no plans of moving, as his life is firmly rooted on this quiet street, but he is concerned about what the future may have in store for the area in terms of big-city crime filtering its way to his location, where well-manicured lawns and leafy trees dot an urban landscape.
“It was an usual case,” he said. “This has always been a great neighbourhood. It scares me because the future doesn’t look too promising in the sense that if this is happening, then my goodness.”