The death of Sammy Yatim on a downtown streetcar has become a lightning rod for competing political agendas, but in life he was just an immigrant kid from Syria, described as “average,” even by his father.
His death continues to shake the city.
Last Monday, Toronto police Const. James Forcillo was charged with second-degree murder in Yatim’s death, only the second police officer in the 23-year history of the Special Investigations Unit to face such a charge. Three reviews and investigations are underway by the SIU, the Toronto Police Service and the provincial ombudsman, either into Yatim’s killing or policing tactics, particularly around de-escalating tense situations.
As the public continues to demand answers as to what happened to the 18-year-old, his closest friends are struggling to understand how a young man who was finally finding his feet in his adopted homeland ended up on a downtown streetcar at midnight on July 27, where he was shot eight times and Tasered by police.
Childhood in Aleppo
On a sunny, breezy afternoon, Sarah Yatim stands in a white pickup truck in front of hundreds of protesters. Her long dark hair is tucked under a baseball cap printed with her brother’s name, Sammy, for whom this demonstration is being held in front of Toronto police headquarters on College St.
“Justice for Sammy, justice for all,” she shouts. The crowd repeats it, and other well-worn protest slogans such as “no justice, no peace.”
It is Aug. 13, and the police board is meeting inside.
The crowd grows restless and surges forward, but a line of police officers form a barricade with their bicycles.
Next to Sarah Yatim’s pickup truck stands a pale, frail figure dressed in black, Sahar Bahadi, Yatim’s mother. Bahadi doesn’t join in the chants. She doesn’t jeer at some of the juvenile antics, like the man dangling a doughnut in front of a police officer’s nose. Bahadi stares ahead at the police building. She appears to be locked in a grief fathomable only to a parent who has lost a child. Later she will meet police Chief Bill Blair.
One of the last people to see Yatim alive was his high school friend Nadeem Jeries, 18. In the final weeks of his life, Yatim seemed upbeat about the future and planned to study health services management at George Brown College in the fall, says Jeries. He was musing about following his mother’s footsteps into medicine. Bahadi is a pediatrician.
“He made everyone smile around him, it was unbelievable,” says Jeries.
The boy had no mental illnesses or drug issues, his family said in a statement after his death.
Yatim was born Nov. 5, 1994, and grew up with his sister in a middle-class Christian family in Aleppo, Syria’s second city. Their father, Nabil, was a management consultant. The couple is divorced.
Aleppo’s Christians, about 10 per cent of the city’s 3 million residents, are one of the largest Christian communities in the Middle East. Yatim attended a prestigious private school, Al Amal, associated with the Greek Catholic diocese, says Paolo Abdelnour, a childhood friend who now lives in Beirut.
There were about seven boys in their social circle, a mix of Muslims and Christians who spent their time smoking shisha pipes and hanging out at cafes like typical Syrian teenagers.
“He used to drink a lot, Lebanese beer for example, but he didn’t do any drugs,” Abdelnour says. “We also used to go boxing. Yatim would do anything for me.”
Fast friends
Nabil Yatim moved to Canada in the late 1960s, while Bahadi stayed in Aleppo, where she practised medicine. Sammy Yatim was sent to live with his father in Toronto in 2008, and Sarah followed about a year and a half ago, says close friend Sasha Maghami.
Yatim enrolled at Brébeuf College, an all-boys Catholic high school in North York, where he became friends with Jeries, a Jordanian with whom he could comfortably communicate in Arabic, and another teenager. Maghami joined the clique in the summer of 2009, when the school offered coed courses.
“My icebreaker was, ‘Where are you from?’ ” Maghami says by phone from Australia, where she’s teaching English. “He’s like, ‘Oh, I’m from Syria.’ I’m like, ‘I’ve never seen a Syrian before.’ ”
Yatim, his green eyes sparkling, had a cheeky response. “They all look different, but I look the best.”
Maghami was charmed. The four friends were inseparable that summer, playing poker at lunch, laughing, sharing stories.
Despite the friendships, it was a difficult adjustment for Yatim. He returned to Aleppo during the summers to stay with his mother, and Maghami says they communicated by Skype.
His former teacher, Megan Douglas, fondly remembers Yatim as the polite boy with a stunning smile in her Grade 9 and 10 math classes at Brébeuf College. He struggled with English but managed to keep up academically.
“There were some kids in there that helped him out and I helped him out,” says Douglas. “He was just a great, great kid. I loved him with all my heart.”
Yatim was proud of his Syrian heritage, but by the summer of 2011, Syria had become dangerous, as peaceful demonstrations asking for political reform were rapidly giving way to civil war.
Aleppo became a key battleground and is now divided. Rebels hold the north and east; the government controls the rest. The two sides are fighting a war of attrition, district by district.
A report from the lobby group Human Rights Watch last April described a pattern in which government fighter jets strike a civilian neighbourhood, residents flee and when they return home, they are attacked again. The regime is killing its citizens with Scud missiles; its snipers shoot children.
The war has become intensely sectarian, with Sunni jihadists forming the main rebel militias. “Christians to Beirut, Alawites to the grave,” is a common refrain.
Most of Aleppo’s Christians have fled.
“Christians were under threat and there were fears,” says Yatim’s childhood friend Abdelnour, a Catholic, whose family fled to Lebanon last year.
But Yatim’s new life in Toronto had more in common with the typical immigrant experience of trying to fit in, a world away from the deadly geopolitics of the Middle East.
Many Syrian Christian parents in the GTA gravitate to the churches to keep their kids connected to their culture and religion — and out of trouble, observes Husam Wafaei, a Canadian Armed Forces veteran who moved here from Syria in 1973. Wafaei is president of the Syrian Canadian Foundation for Humanity, a non-governmental organization.
“They are more conservative than the Muslims, they tend to be more close-knit, traditional families,” he says. “I’ve been meeting a lot of young newcomers and their families. The problem is once their confidence increases the kids see themselves as Canadian, but the parents resist.”
The young Yatim was nervous about his new life, recalls Ahmad Kalaji, 19, of Oakville.
“He was easygoing and we hit it off,” says Kalaji, who shared with Yatim his own experiences of emigrating from Aleppo. “But as kids, not knowing cultural references is hard, let’s say a TV show or something and you don’t get the jokes or conversation because you didn’t follow it in Syria. I’d say Sammy adapted, like everyone else.”
Kalaji is still angry about his friend’s death in what is supposed to be a safe city.
“I don’t care if he was carrying a knife, he was a kid,” he says. “This is supposed to be a modern country where there are human rights.”
Tough-kid image
Gradually, Yatim became more comfortable at school. His circle of friends expanded and his dress sense changed. He went from wearing Euro-style Adidas track suits to snapback caps and graphic tees and he started smoking pot, all in an effort to cultivate a tougher image.
“They were swearing so much more,” says Maghami, referring to his friends. “They would go to school to just hang out with friends rather than actually go to class. Weed became an everyday ritual instead of . . . a weekly thing.”
The tough-kid image was different from the Sammy Yatim that Maghami knew. When they talked on Skype, his new slang and swearing disappeared. He played guitar for her.
“He was just like my Sammy. Always smiling, laughing all the time, playing his guitar, talking about his mom and his sister,” she says.
Yatim was private, but Maghami believes she was closer to him than most. He would talk about the war and missing home.
“I think that deep down, no one can say, like even me and Buhair (a close friend in Syria), we can’t say we know him to his very core because there’s so much,” says Maghami. “He was very, very introverted.”
There was trouble with his father.
“His dad was never around the way his mom was because he didn’t live with him,” says Maghami, referring to his Aleppo childhood. He often travelled for work, Maghami says.
After Grade 10, Douglas also noticed changes in Yatim in small ways. For example, he’d wear a hat in the hallways, which was against the rules. But he was still respectful to his teacher.
“I noticed he was kind of hanging around the wrong guys,” she says. “It just looked like he was trying to find himself.”
Yatim and his father fought, says Maghami. Like typical teenage arguments, they would start over school or marijuana but would turn into bigger issues, although Maghami says she didn’t get to the bottom of what they were.
“It’s almost like he wants to tell you, like he’ll tell me everything that’s going on, but he’ll leave out the root,” she says. “Maybe he thought he was going to break down, or he was ashamed.”
Earlier this year, Yatim and his father had a massive blow up and the teenager moved out.
“He was just so sick of the arguments,” says Maghami.
He rented a room near Danforth Ave. and Main St., where his roommates built a bunk bed.
Friends say he was happy, building a life on his own, with dreams of running a hospital.
“He was always ready to be that person to fix everybody else’s life, because he couldn’t really fix his own,” says Maghami.
The final night
On July 26, Jeries and Yatim were hanging out at Fairview Mall and planning a party. The pair smoked a few cigarettes. Around 10 p.m., Yatim phoned his roommate Nathan Schifitto and said he would meet him at the apartment.
Jeries watched his friend walk into Don Mills station at about 10:30 p.m. It was the last time he’d see him alive.
Jeries says he doesn’t know what Yatim got up to between 10:30 and his death about an hour and a half later, when he exposed his genitals and waved a knife at terrified passengers on the westbound Dundas streetcar, near Grace St., prompting police to arrive and open fire.
Jeries can’t understand why his friend was even downtown. Their preferred stomping ground was Scarborough.
“I’m pretty sure he never took a streetcar in his life before,” says Jeries. “I don’t know what made him do that that night.”
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