Death in 51 Division
by Tom Lyons
Eye Reporter
Eye
The alleged fatal police beating of Stuart Mitchell, a 49-year-old homeless man, is under investigation by the provincial Special Investigations Unit (SIU). Many questions remain unanswered, but the generally agreed-upon elements of the story are these: Mitchell encountered a group of police on the evening of Jan. 30 at a rooming house at 70 Winchester Ave. in the Parliament and Wellesley neighbourhood, where he and a friend were visiting a tenant. Mitchell later told residents of the Salvation Army hostel on Broadview, where he was living, that the police had jumped on his chest. He was taken to hospital on Feb. 1 and died on Feb. 20 of complications following surgery to repair a collapsed lung. A female police constable has been designated by the SIU as a witness officer in the case.
Almost everything else about the evening's events, though, is a tangle of contradictory accounts. It is still unclear, for example, exactly when or why police visited the rooming house on Jan. 30. They have been variously described as responding to a noise complaint or a gun complaint, and arriving there at 10:30pm or 11:30pm.
What does seem clear, however, is that the version of events agreed upon by the SIU and reports in The Toronto Star seems a somewhat arbitrary choice -- and that this version is the one most favourable to the officers who may be accused of assaulting Mitchell.
One more thing seems certain: as with other allegations of police brutality in the central-east core, witnesses are afraid to give out their names or testify. Furthermore, any investigation will have to untangle the inherently confused and contradictory nature of street tales and hostel rumours.
MISSING HOURS
The version of events put forth last week by both the SIU and reports in The Star suggests that Mitchell did not return to the Salvation Army hostel on Broadview until 7am on Jan. 31 -- so seven hours of his time are unaccounted for. This admits the possibility that someone other than the police might have delivered the ultimately fatal injuries.
But according to hostel residents who were interviewed by eye a week before the March 8 SIU request for public assistance in determining Mitchell's movements, there is no mysterious seven-hour gap. Mitchell returned to the Salvation Army hostel the night he was beaten.
"The night the incident happened, he came back to the hostel," said a resident who asked not to be named. "And he was in his bed -- his bed was next to my best friend. And I was over talking to my friend. And in his sleep Stuart had been calling out, 'Stop, don't do this any more. Stop.' Which to me sounded like he was defending himself, or trying to fend off some sort of blows."
Even the unnamed "friend," a primary source of the Star reports that Mitchell went missing for seven hours, earlier told eye that Mitchell did in fact return to the Salvation Army hostel that evening -- and that it was the friend who stayed away for the whole night: "I saw him the next morning when I came back."
The same source has given very different accounts of the police visit to the room on Winchester on Jan. 30. In an interview with The Star published March 9, he stated that Mitchell was still in the room when the police arrived at 10:30pm (police say they arrived at 11:30pm) and that the three men -- Mitchell, the friend and the tenant -- refused to give their names to police "because we were in a private room."
Yet the source told eye on March 7 that there were only two men in the room at 10:30 -- himself and the tenant -- and that both men gave their names.
"They asked me who I was. And I told them who I was. And they asked the person whose dwelling it was who they were. And that's basically what happened," the friend said. "Stuart had left maybe 10, 15 minutes earlier."
That Mitchell's friend gave contradictory versions of the same events is not particularly surprising. In fact, none of the accounts of the Mitchell case fully match up with each other. According to various residents of the hostel, Mitchell said police "jumped on his chest," police shoved him down a flight of stairs or that he panicked and fell down the stairs on his own and was then jumped by police at the bottom.
However, statements by the SIU and reports in The Star have so far settled on a single version of events -- the one most likely to exonerate police.
TROUBLE IN 51 DIVISION
According to people who live or work in the area, Mitchell's case is not an isolated incident. Police brutality against marginalized individuals in the central-east core is claimed to be a time-honoured tradition, along with the confusing mix of fact and fiction that follows in its wake.
Gaetan Heroux is a long-time social worker in the Dundas and Sherbourne area and a member of the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty. Last weekend he spoke at a rally organized to protest the alleged police beating of three young black men on March 5 outside a Metro Toronto Housing Authority building on Bleeker Street, a few blocks from the rooming house where police are alleged to have assaulted Mitchell.
"I remember when I first came to work at Central Neighbourhood House," says Heroux. "There was a meeting I had with some native men, where we talked about Cherry Beach [where police allegedly take people to intimidate or punish them], and every one of them knew about Cherry Beach, and several of them had been taken to Cherry Beach."
As in the Mitchell case, allegations of police brutality in 51 Division are usually diluted by the fact that witnesses are afraid to give out their names or testify. The allegations are also complicated by the confusing nature of the stories and rumours passed along on the streets and in hostels. In the past, 51 Division police have dismissed claims of police brutality as "unreliable" misinformation from "discredible" sources. (One example concerns police union boss Craig Bromell, one of nine 51 Division officers accused in 1996 of kidnapping a man, taking him to Cherry Beach and beating him in retaliation for assaulting an officer. The accuser, Thomas Kerr, was a drifter with a criminal record. All nine officers were cleared of any wrongdoing.)
Laying a formal complaint against police in 51 Division is widely regarded as pointless or dangerous. As James Abbtossoway discovered, even the SIU isn't necessarily interested in learning whether the oft-told tales of police violence in 51 Division are true.
"I was taken by the police down to Cherry Beach," says Abbtossoway, a 47-year-old ironworker. "I was shot at down there. I was ordered to strip, and then I was ordered to jump in the lake, and I didn't. And then they took out their pistols and started shooting, just around me to make me dance and go in. This is wintertime, very cold out. It was Dec. 10, 1997. I was ordered to jump in the lake, and I didn't, and then they started shooting. Then they picked up my clothes and they said, 'Walk.' "
Abbtossoway says he contacted the SIU about the incident, but nothing came of it.
Gail Scala, an SIU spokesperson, says the unit would not investigate a case like Abbtossoway's because no serious injury or death occurred.
The alleged police gang-beating of a psychiatric outpatient at the Street City hostel on March 29, 1999, didn't warrant an SIU investigation, says Scala, because, after a preliminary inquiry, a doctor determined that the man suffered no broken bones or life-threatening injuries. Bruises are not sufficient.
"We use the definition of serious injuries as broken bones and escalate from there," says Scala. "There were no broken bones."
Since the SIU doesn't investigate claims of police beatings that don't involve serious injury or death, it seems likely that tales of police violence in 51 Division will continue to be ignored or dismissed as "unreliable" stories from "discredible" characters.
Organizers of the Committee to Stop Target Policing, a group of social agencies and community members, say that "homeless people living under the bridges in the south end of the city have consistently had the police come to their area and destroy their possessions, including tents or makeshift shelters."
Gaetan Heroux says he is almost ready to give up trying to convince city officials that incidents like the death of Stuart Mitchell are part of a pattern of police violence and harassment in the downtown core, and especially in 51 Division.
"Every time we try to address this issue, the process is hijacked by the agencies and politicians," says Heroux. "And people are herded into meetings in back rooms to talk about various issues. But nothing really gets done, so it just gets swept back under the carpet."
Courtesy of Eye
March 16, 2000