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rfmcdonaldToronto has an annoying, intermittantly endearing, tendency to compare itself to world metropolises like New York City? On Monday, as the Globe and Mail article "Toronto woman’s desperate attempt to stay alive in freezing temperatures" (among others) indicates, Toronto had its own Kitty Genovese moment.
Of course, the Kitty Genovese incident was overblown: none of the 38 identified witnesses saw the entire incident, and people who did see elements of the incident had reasonable grounds to think that something else was happening. Much the same seems to be true of Monday's early morning tragedy. That just highlights the similarities, mind.
In the snowy streets of a Scarborough, Ont. neighbourhood, Judy Tak Fong Lam Chiu left a chilling trail that led to her frozen body.
Her winter coat and glasses were discarded, a symptom of the dementia that clouded her mind, while fingernail marks on the screen door of a house and on a parked car demonstrated her desperate attempt to stay alive as the temperatures dipped as low as -20 C early Monday morning.
[. . .]
She was pronounced dead in hospital at 7:05 a.m., but may have survived, police say, if some of the neighbours who heard her screams for help around 2 a.m. had intervened or called 911. One resident even looked outside and noticed someone stumbling around in the dark and cold, said Sergeant David Dubé, and then went back to bed.
“It’s a circumstance where we should have been notified to attend,” Sgt. Dubé said. “As a community, we have an obligation to look after each other. That’s what it’s about.”
[. . .]
George Cheang, a 22-year-old York University business student who lives on Kennaley Crescent, awoke in the middle of the night to the sound of screaming, but assumed it was neighbours arguing or returning home from a party, and stayed in bed. He would have acted differently if he had he known what was happening, he said, and insisted that most neighbours on the quiet street are friendly, say hello and help each other out.
“The way I see it is, it happened on my street. It could have happened on your street,” said Mr. Cheang, who has lived with his parents in the neighbourhood since they moved from Macau 10 years ago. “I’m not worried about people judging me. I’m more worried about what happened to the woman on the street.”
Other residents said they believed people should have helped, but may have been too fearful to intervene. “You don’t know who’s going to be there when you open the door,” said Lucy Abdelmaseeh, who lives about half a block down from where the woman was found, but said she didn’t hear anything.
Of course, the Kitty Genovese incident was overblown: none of the 38 identified witnesses saw the entire incident, and people who did see elements of the incident had reasonable grounds to think that something else was happening. Much the same seems to be true of Monday's early morning tragedy. That just highlights the similarities, mind.
