The man accused of fatally shooting two people and wounding 13 others on a bustling Toronto street struggled with severe mental illness, his family said on Monday, 23 July, as police sought a motive in the rampage.
Less than a day after a 10-year-old girl and 18-year-old woman were killed, the suspect was identified by the independent Special Investigations Unit (SIU) as Faisal Hussain, a 29-year-old Toronto resident. He was found dead shortly after the shooting, authorities said.
"We do not know why this happened," Toronto Police Chief Mark Saunders told reporters on Monday, adding he would not speculate about the gunman's motive. "It's way too early to rule out anything."
The suspect, armed with a handgun, opened fire at 10 pm on Sunday on a stretch of Danforth Avenue filled with restaurants and family-friendly attractions in an area of east Toronto known as the Greektown neighborhood, the SIU said.
It was the second deadly act of mass violence this year in Canada's most populous city. In April, a driver deliberately ploughed his white Ryder rental van into a lunch-hour crowd, killing 10 people and injuring 15 along a roughly mile-long (1.6-km) stretch of sidewalk thronged with pedestrians.
"We are utterly devastated by the incomprehensible news that our son was responsible for the senseless violence and loss of life," Hussain's family wrote in a statement, adding he suffered from severe mental illness as well as from "psychosis and depression his entire life."
"We are looking at all possible motives ... and not closing any doors," Toronto Police Chief Mark Saunders told reporters at the site of the shooting.
Paramedics, firefighters and police converged on the scene in Toronto's east end, which has many popular restaurants, cafes and shops. Police said the gunman used a handgun.
The gunman, a 29-year-old man, exchanged fire with police, fled and was later found deceased, local media reported.
Reports of gunfire in the city's Greektown neighborhood began at 10 pm local time (0200 GMT Monday), CityNews.com said. Witnesses said they heard 25 gunshots, the news website reported.
Witnesses Describe the Chaos
“I thought it was fireworks at first,” a witness named John Tulloch told CBC News.
We saw people starting to run in our direction. I still didn’t know what it was and then more people started running.John Tulloch
Another witness living in the area, Andrew Van Eek, said he saw the shooter take aim at the victims.
"There was a lot of commotion in the street," he told CBC news. "I saw somebody come just down the sidewalk and shoot into Demetres restaurant."
Shooter Caught on Camera
Hours after the shooting, a video uploaded on Twitter showed the alleged gunman opening fire.
Toronto’s Emerging Gun Problem
Toronto is grappling with a sharp rise in gun violence this year. Deaths from gun violence in the city jumped 53 percent to 26 so far in 2018 from the same period last year, police data last week showed, with the number of shootings rising 13 percent.
Toronto deployed about 200 police officers from 20 July in response to the recent spate of shootings, which city officials have blamed on gang violence.
Toronto Mayor John Tory told reporters that the city has a gun problem and guns were too readily available to too many people.
(Inputs from Reuters, CNN)
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