When grieving, we often seek a culprit no matter the situation
Cops don’t go around throwing people off balconies.
But to hear social media conspiracists tell it — and you really shouldn’t pay them any mind — that’s what York Regional Police officers did in the early morning hours Monday.
At around 5 a.m., a 21-year-old man fell to his death from an upper floor of a highrise condominium on Sherway Gardens Road, landing on a fourth-floor patio. The officers were there to execute a search warrant.
Neither York police nor the Special Investigations Unit have disclosed any further details — not the man’s name, not what the warrant was for, not if the victim actually lived in that unit, and not what interaction, if any, had occurred before the tragic event.
Obviously it’s early days in the investigation. But that’s how law enforcement institutions roll in Canada, where ferreting out any information is a constant challenge, police and other authorities routinely ducking behind “privacy rights” and unwillingness to compromise an ongoing investigation. Which is just as routinely bollocks. The truth is they just don’t want to say because that’s part of our no-tell culture.
Unlike the United States, where cops can’t wait to spill all the beans they’ve got at the drop of an inquiry. Witness the intense details that have been revealed since Sunday’s attempted assassination of former president Donald Trump at a Florida golf course. True, though, that the Secret Service and FBI are probably trying to pre-emptively cover their butts — how an alleged assassin could get lethally close to Trump for the second time in a couple of months.
Still, on occasions when I’ve covered active criminal events in the U.S. — from the Washington sniper to O.J. Simpson murder trial — police chiefs have stood in front of cameras and revealed nearly everything they had to share, sometimes in hour-to-hour updates.
This poor fellow who died Monday hasn’t been named yet. And from my sniffing around the condo complex Tuesday, no resident I buttonholed had any knowledge of that individual.
Yet the mind jumps to certain immediate connections. And as memory serves, there have been quite a few similar incidents involving police.
This particular episode involves York Region cops. But a search of the SIU database — 3,130 investigations undertaken across the province since 2017 where police were involved in cases that resulted in civilian deaths, serious injury or alleged sexual assault — turns up 11 cases related to Toronto police, under similar circumstances: Police at or nearby when a person either fell or threw themselves off a balcony or out a window, resulting in death.
In several of those incidents, family members have blamed police for the fatal outcome, even sued, despite exhaustive investigations by the SIU, which cleared all the officers of any criminal liability. It’s understandable that grieving parents and siblings will look for a culprit rather than accept that they’re loved ones made a bad decision, took a perilous risk, were seized by duress in an episode of mental illness or fully intended to take their own life.
Far more often its cops trying to talk an individual away from the edge, quite literally. There was the case a couple of years ago where officers in a passing cruiser tried to prevent a man from jumping off the Leaside Bridge. One cop grabbed the edge of his coat, the other clutched his hand, but the man wrestled to release himself, the grip loosened and he leapt onto the Don Valley Parkway.
Last Christmas Day, Toronto cops tried to negotiate with a man on an balcony after responding to reports of a male breaking into an apartment. From an adjacent balcony, they offered tea and sympathy, summoned a member of the emergency task force trained in negotiating with people in a mental crisis. But the man jumped — or slipped — to his death anyway.
To this day, the anguished family of Taresh Bobby Ramroop remain infuriated with Toronto police over the 32-year-old man’s death in 2022 — plunging from a 14th floor bedroom window. The family insists police prevented Ramroop’s mother from talking through the barricaded door to her mentally distressed son. Police countered that they feared Ramroop — who’d placed a 911 call himself earlier that afternoon, saying someone had broken into his apartment — was possibly armed with a knife (missing from a knife block in the kitchen) and, if allowed to speak with his mother “one last time,” as he’d implored — would set the stage for a suicidal impulse.
Cops tried every which way to coax Ramroop into opening the door. Radio transcripts, body-worn camera footage, civilian and police witness accounts, supported the police version of events, as the SIU concluded. But some people won’t accept the truth.
The family of Regis KorchinskiPaquet filed a lawsuit against the city, five police officers, Toronto Community Housing and the SIU as well, two years after the 29-yearold woman fell from the 24th floor balcony of her High Park apartment while cops were there, claiming police had deliberately misled the SIU and shared false information following her death — an incident, two days after the killing of George Floyd in 2020, that set off protests in Toronto.
The SIU investigation confirmed that Korchinski-Paquet attempted to climb from one balcony to another, lost her balance and fell, the case supported by security cameras, witness statements and microphone audio from the officers. But the woman’s mother, on the day her daughter died, posted a video stating police had pushed her daughter off the balcony.
“The police killed my daughter, came into my apartment and shoved her off the balcony.”
In another case from last summer, a man claimed he was awakened in a panic when police broke down his Adelaide Street apartment door — they were executing a search warrant — and he jumped to a patio below, fracturing his arm and dislocating an elbow. Cops, who’d announced themselves at the door, were stunned: “He jumped over!” He also threw over a bag containing fentanyl, more of which was found in his apartment.
And sometimes, there’s just no explanation for any of it. Like the two men who fell to their death from the very same Wellesley Street apartment three months apart.
There were no cops around.