Angry in the Great White North

When I saw this email from the Toronto Police Service, my interest was immediately piqued:

Friday, June 1, 2007 - 6:28 PM
42 Division
416-808-4200

On Friday, June 1, 2007, at 1:03 p.m., police received a call for a personal injury accident in the Birchmount Road/Bay Mill Boulevard area.

On arrival, officers located a 16-year-old girl, an 18-year-old man, and a 21- year-old man who had been struck by a vehicle.

It is alleged that:

• the driver of a van drove towards three people and struck them,
• the vehicle then struck a fence and tree.

The three victims were taken to hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.

The driver of the vehicle, a 43-year-old man, of Toronto, was arrested at the scene. He has been charged with three counts of Attempted Murder.

A charge of attempted murder requires that the alleged deliberately tried to kill, with "malice aforethought" as they would say in a Sherlock Holmes story. And the ages -- a 43-year-old targeting teens?

A family affair?

Turns out that is exactly what happened. A father trying to kill his daughter or her boyfriend or both:

What initially appeared to be a tragic accident is now being considered a vicious act of malice after a father allegedly ran over a trio of young people, one of which was his own 16-year-old daughter.

It happened at Birchmount and Bay Mills Blvd. in Scarborough near Sheppard on Friday afternoon, right beside Stephen Leacock C.I., where two of the victims are students.

Police believe the father was enraged with his daughter's choice of a boyfriend, and when he saw them together Friday he allegedly aimed his van in their direction. A third person was also hit.

"The car came along and it appears that it deliberately ran them down," confirmed Sgt. Jane Cassells. "The father, receiving information today, he came here on the scene with his vehicle and [allegedly] deliberately drove it towards a group of people."

The vehicle ended up on a front lawn, coming to a dead stop after hitting a tree.

All three were rushed to separate hospitals with non-life threatening injuries. Authorities say the worst of those is a broken hip. The other two victims, both males, were aged 18 and 21.

"The two males got up and ran towards Stephen Leacock high school and this is where the driver was subsequently arrested," adds Detective Don Pyke.

"It's very unusual. I don't think I've ever investigated one family member running over another family member."

In a strange twist, the daughter's boyfriend, Pream Anandarajah, was also the vicitm of a violent attack six weeks ago.

At the end of April, Anandarajah's home was gutted after a Molotov cocktail was thrown through the living room window.

From reading this, it looks like dad managed to run over his daughter and break her hip.

The firebombing seems unrelated to this vehicular attack, as reported in the Toronto Star over a week ago:

Pream Anandarajah, clean cut and Toronto born, slides down low in the passenger seat. He looks cautiously over his right shoulder at a group of students gathered near his high school.

"That's them," he says, referring to the FOBs.

It's a common insult directed at recent immigrants that means "fresh off the boat," in this case, from Sri Lanka.

Though he doesn't follow much of his parents' Sri Lankan culture, Anandarajah wears a white symbol of mourning streaked across the middle of his forehead for his mother, Jeyaluckshmi, who is in Sunnybrook hospital's burn unit.

A firebomb filled with gas crashed through the living room window of the family's uninsured Scarborough bungalow on April 25, gutting the home. Nine young men have since been arrested for their involvement in the attack, threats against Anandarajah and other recent assaults.

His mother was burned over 30% of her body, and his 12-year-old sister was also hurt in the attack.

The tension is driving the violence is related to being Canadian:

According to Anandarajah and his friends, the current conflict involves about 150 youths in Scarborough from six high schools. Many have graduated or been expelled for the fighting over the last two years.

Anandarajah says because many of the rival Sri Lankan youth grew up in that country's violent civil war before escaping to Canada, they are using similar violence here. But there are no religious or political issues: Most of the students involved on both sides are Hindu Tamils.

Hours before the firebombing, a friend of Anandarajah's was stabbed near Winston Churchill Collegiate.

Police investigating the stabbing say no arrests have been made yet. "There's two conflicting groups," said Det. Sgt. Rick Searl. "Pream has been helpful, but he hasn't been completely forthcoming. We know there's other stuff he knows."

They say the tension begins in high school. They get harassed for playing cricket, having unfashionable hairdos, wearing tight-fitting shirts, too high pants and speaking Tamil.

They still play cricket and speak Tamil, but now look just like Anandarajah's friends, in their baggy jeans, and loose T-shirts or hoodies. In changing fashions, they try to shed the FOB label and the stereotype that comes with it: nerdy, weird and unable to adjust. Now, perhaps to distance themselves from the widely used label, they call their fellow newcomers "FOBS."

Anandarajah says he no longer uses the term. "Not to their face. I use it to refer to them, but I wouldn't say it to them. I just don't know why they can't be more Canadian. It's the white kids who start calling them FOBs, not us.

"I used to dress the way they dress when they come here," he admits. Later in the afternoon he's met up with seven friends, six of Sri Lankan descent and one Iranian, at a parking lot near his high school. Hip-hop blares from the speaker system of a Honda Civic, as they explain why they don't like the FOBs.

"They can't speak English, they have these weird haircuts," says Chris, a Grade 12 student at nearby L'Amoreaux Collegiate. "The way they walk and they dress bad. It gives Sri Lankans a bad name, it's embarrassing."

I say the two attacks were unrelated, but I have to wonder if Pream and his girlfriend are from these opposing groups. Or maybe Pream and his girlfriend had decided to ignore some Tamil rules concerning appropriate relationships, figuring that in Canada those rules were irrelevant. The offence to her father's old country attitudes motivated the alleged attack, not unlike the cultural divisions driving these other violent incidents.

Assuming the girlfriend was Tamil.

Maybe this is a Romeo and Juliet story.

Looks like there might be deeper layers to this story. It'll be interesting to see how it evolves.