Vaughan shooting puts city, already vibrating with negative energy, on edge

There seems to be something in the air in the city right now, at a time when we expect the jingling of sleigh bells and bright lights to inspire joy and generosity. Instead, there’s a brittleness and tension, writes columnist Edward Keenan.

Thestar.com
Dec. 20, 2022
Edward Keenan

OPINION
There’s a blanket of snow on the lawns of the Bellaria Residences condo towers in Vaughan, and inside the gates of that luxury apartment community, you can see the decorative signs of the season: giant candy canes outside one entrance, birch logs and pine boughs in the planters, a sign in an apartment window reading “Merry Christmas.”

But one week before the Christmas holiday, the grounds were a site of shock and grieving rather than festivity on a cold Monday morning. Police tape cordoned off the entryway around those holiday planters at 9235 Jane St.; a forensic unit truck and several SUVs from the York Regional Police department filled the driveway; TV reporters stood doing grim standup reports just outside the black iron fences. Residents peered cautiously through upstairs windows at the scene below. Neighbours walking by shook their heads sadly as they passed.

Less than a day earlier, it had been the site of a “horrific scene,” as described by York Regional Police Chief Jim MacSween. Another one.

There seems to be something in the air in the city right now, at a time when we expect the jingling of sleigh bells and bright lights to inspire joy and generosity. Instead, there’s a brittleness and tension piercing through everyday frustrations and exploding into episodes of violence. The death of 31-year-old Vanessa Kurpiewska earlier this month is still fresh in everyone’s minds, after she and another woman were stabbed by a stranger at High Park subway station. On Sunday, hours before the horrific shootings in Vaughan, a man was stabbed to death on the street downtown. A woman was arrested Monday morning after assaulting “numerous people,” some of whom required the attention of medics afterward, at St. Clair subway station. The memory of a shooting rampage that claimed the life of a police officer in Mississauga in September has barely faded.

You want to keep a sense of perspective, and not get swept up in headlines about sensational crimes to become fearful. Yet, perhaps because of a general sense of unease that many people have been feeling as a hangover from the isolation of the pandemic, and a sudden fierce uptick in frustrations such as traffic jams and overcrowded events that have followed from it, these bursts of violence seem to be contributing an anxious edge to an atmosphere already marked by heightened tensions.

The standard neighbourly frictions of city life are already vibrating with unusually negative energy for many of us, and it seems, looking at the news, as though these everyday interactions are suddenly prone to exploding into violence.
And so it was in Vaughan on Sunday, when 73-year-old resident Francesco Villi is alleged to have used a semi-automatic handgun to rampage from floor to floor in his building during the 7 o’clock hour, leaving three men and two women dead in three separate apartment units, and sending another victim -- a 66-year-old woman -- to the hospital, before being shot and killed himself by a police officer.

One of the sadly standard scripts for such events would feature neighbours saying they could never have imagined such a thing happening. And while no neighbours said they predicted this scene of horror, the emerging details of this shooting appear to indicate there were warning signs.

Police have confirmed that three of those killed were members of the condo building’s board, and court documents and a series of ominous Facebook videos posted by Villi detail a long and tortured dispute he is said to have pursued over a period of years against the board. One judge characterized Villi’s side of that dispute as being marked by a “a complete absence of material facts” and noted his actions allegedly included “threatening, abusive, intimidating and harassing behaviour.” There had been a restraining order taken out against him by board members. One former board member said he’d told his wife “it’s going to end very badly.” He and a current board member separately suggested they had thought Villi to be in need of professional help.

There’s no public information, yet, about the full extent or effect of such attempted mental health interventions. But clearly there were red flags, by the bolt, over a period of years. And now people are dead.

One obvious question that emerges is, how did Villi have or get access to a handgun, with the list of warning signs he was flashing?

Just as obviously, there will almost certainly be questions about his mental health -- without access to any diagnosis of any kind, the record he left behind suggests to me that he was not in his right mind.

But is there ever a case where someone suddenly kills a bunch of people when you could say that mental health is not a factor? Is it, by definition, not an action pursued by psychologically stable people.

The question is why, when his dangerous mental state was so obvious to neighbours, causing threatening and abusive and harassing behaviour over a period of years, no one was able to help? You could ask the same, in much the same way, of those attacking strangers on the subway, or on the street. It is a question vibrating through the lines of tension you can feel in the air: Why can’t anyone seem to help?

The former board member who had predicted a bad end to Villi’s story told the Star he was “not a monster.” He was, the board member said, someone who needed help.

In that, he is like so many other all-too-human perpetrators of violence inspiring episodes of horror and terror and shock. People we need to find a way to help, if not out of some sense of seasonal generosity or general goodwill, at least out of an impulse to protect ourselves, and each other.