[URBAN NOTE] "The Killing of Sammy Yatim"

[rfmcdonald]

Mary Rogan's Toronto Life article on the shooting death of teenager Sammy Yatim on a Dundas West streetcar by Toronto police has gotten quite a lot of attention online. This is not only because of the article's detailed timeline of the event but because of what many commenters think is an unduly sympathetic approach towards the policeman responsible, James Forcillo.

I've touched on the event before, most recently here noting Forcillo's arrest and charge of murder. This is an event that will not go away.

Within an hour, a cellphone video was posted to YouTube and quickly went viral. It was reposted on Facebook and ­Twitter and led every newscast across the city. Toronto was transfixed by the last 90 seconds of Sammy Yatim’s life. A city-wide consensus quickly formed: this 18-year-old didn’t have to die. The police could have held their fire and waited for the ­Taser. They could have tried to talk Yatim down instead of working him up, or shot the knife out of his hand, or used ­pepper spray. There had to be a non-lethal option available. And the question on everyone’s mind was, what kind of cop shoots a troubled teenager nine times?

In his six years on the force, James Forcillo had never fired his gun on the job until that night. He had drawn it before, during an arrest in Kensington Market, but managed to persuade two armed suspects to surrender without incident. Forcillo looks older than his 31 years. He has a square, heavyset build and a wary cast to his eyes. A second-generation Italian-Canadian, he spent his early childhood in Montreal, close to his mother’s large family. His father worked in the textile industry, moving from job to job, with long stretches of money troubles in between. A job change brought the family to Toronto when Forcillo was 12. A few years after that, his father found work in California, and Forcillo and his mom split their time between Toronto and L.A. When he was 18, he moved to ­California to live with his dad full-time, and his mother died of lung cancer shortly afterward. He enrolled in a criminal justice program, something that had interested him since high school, and graduated summa cum laude, but he wasn’t able to work without a green card. His relationship with his father soured, and at age 20 he decided to come back to Toronto to pursue a career in policing.

Forcillo met his future wife, Irina, in 2003, when he rented the basement apartment in her parents’ North York house. Like all cops, he’s prohibited from talking about any case that’s in front of the courts, including his own, but the rule doesn’t ­apply to his wife, who agreed to be interviewed for this story. A manager in a financial services firm, Irina is a stylish woman, self-possessed and yet unexpectedly girlish when she smiles. She comes from a close-knit Ukrainian family that immigrated to Israel when she was seven and then to Canada when she was 15. You can still hear the mix of hard Russian consonants and Israeli inflections in her voice.

They were an unlikely couple—Forcillo is shy and quiet, and Irina is outgoing and boisterous—but her family quickly brought him into the fold. Irina was in the last year of her business degree at U of T, and Forcillo was following a well-worn path to the police force. He worked as a security guard and studied psychology at York. In 2006 he became a court officer, escorting prisoners to and from their cells and maintaining order in the courtroom. The following year, he and Irina were married, and the year after that, when Irina was pregnant with their first child, Forcillo got the call that he had been accepted into the police-training program.