Today's mass shooting brought to you by ... Toronto the Good?!?

‘There’s a man with a gun!’ Madness descends upon the Danforth

Danforth Ave. was closed to traffic and even local residents were prevented from returning home Sunday night, as police investigated a shooting rampage. (RICHARD LAUTENS / TORONTO STAR)

Tanya Wilson was locking up her tattoo shop on the Danforth, heading out for dinner with a friend.

It was just before 10 p.m.

She heard shots.

“I thought it was firecrackers.” She pauses. “No, that’s not true. I thought it was shots.”

Because we think that way now in Toronto, at the sound of hard cracks. Not firecrackers, not a car backfiring. Bullets.

Wilson glimpsed a white man with longish hair, the shooter, and hastily pulled back inside. “Honestly, it was all happening so fast, I didn’t know what to do.”

Suddenly, two people outside were banging on the front door, pleading to be let in.

In her panic, Wilson at first feared these individuals might have been allied with the gunman in some way, trying to force themselves into her business, Skin Deep.

Then she saw the blood.

Both the older woman and a younger man had been struck.

Wilson hustled them indoors. Put each in one of her tattoo chairs and set about applying first aid, first fashioning a tourniquet above the bullet holes. Both — a mother and her adult son, she’d learn — had been hit in the leg, below the knee.

“I know how to handle blood,” Wilson told the Star. “I put on my medical gloves. Mostly it’s just using common sense.”

She turned off the lights, hoping anybody outside would think it was empty. Then all of them huddled for the half-hour before paramedics discovered them.

Four hours later, with the victims removed by ambulance, Wilson and her friend were still being held on the premises, waiting to be interviewed by police.

A block away, her tattoo teacher, Trevor Boucher, had pulled up in a vehicle, trying to talk his way past a police cordon on Logan. But only cops and first responders were being allowed through. Even those who live on the Danforth, trying to make their way home on a Sunday night, were being turned away, advised to find somewhere else to sleep on this maddened night.

Boucher worked the phones in three-way conversations, trying to calm Wilson. “I’m covered in blood!”

“Let me get my girl,” Boucher implored officers, to no avail. “Or let her come to me. She’s terrified.”

To the Star, he said: “She’s a hero. She saved people tonight.”

“It’s just so weird,” said Wilson, when the Star reached her. “I mean, we’re all aware of the shootings that have been happening around the city. But this is the Danforth, you know? It’s a beautiful neighbourhood with always lots of people on the street, walking around, going to restaurants, sitting on patios.

“How did it get so crazy?”

Wilson’s thoughts were with the little girl, 9 years old, rushed to emergency in critical condition, as police Chief Mark Saunders confirmed in a hastily called session with reporters, also revealing that a woman had been killed in the shooting spree, and a total of 13 wounded. Hours later, the SIU announced that a second victim had died.

At Second Cup, on the corner of Danforth and Hampton Aves., the owner was pointing out three bullet holes that had pierced the front window.

The small patio out front had been full of patrons, enjoying the mild evening.

“I was in the back so I didn’t see what happened,” said one employee. “But suddenly all these people were running through here.”

Directly in front of the Second Cup, police had placed upturned coffee cups, marking the spots where shell casings had been found — a dozen of them in that chunk of sidewalk alone.

Nobody inside had been injured.

Jessica Young, an employee, said she’d seen the shooter.

“He was probably no taller than me, wearing a black baseball cap, dark clothes. He had light skin. I think he had short facial hair. That’s all I could make out,” Young said, adding that the suspect appeared to have a pistol or handgun.

“I was shaken, terrified. It’s not every day you almost get shot.”

Another man: “I heard at least 20 shots, in intervals. Clippings spent, reloading, shooting.”

Other witnesses said the man had his shirt sleeves rolled up, had walked back and forth across Danforth, shooting indiscriminately, taking a shooter’s stance, as if he knew how to handle a firearm. It appears to have been a semi-automatic, with a magazine, given the volley of shots — multiple bang-bang-bang — with pauses in between.

“He was skinny but he had this horrible look on his face,” another witness told reporters, “like he was under the influence or something.”

The shooter was only some 10 feet away.

“I fell down. He ran across, kept shooting and ran down the street.”

In the small hours, video captured on cellphones began surfacing on social media. A man is seen firing into storefronts and cafés, walking westward through Greektown. A man on a mission, apparently.

At some points — the details are sketchy — there was an exchange of gunfire between the shooter and police. It’s unclear if the suspect turned the gun on himself or was killed by a cop, but dead he is. The Special Investigations Unit arrived on the scene, late. Danforth, closed off to traffic and the TTC, was crawling with cops for hours afterwards, including the Emergency Task Force. The bomb squad also conducted a controlled detonation of a package, which may have been the bag some witnesses said they saw the shooter carrying.

“We’re going to blow up a package now,” an officer warned onlookers milling around the Danforth-Broadview intersection.

The thump of that detonation could be heard for blocks around 1 a.m.

Saunders and Mayor John Tory tried to reassure the public. They’ve done a lot of that over recent weeks and months as blood has been spilled on the streets, in a playground, on the Entertainment District sidewalk, in Yorkville.

But this mass shooting has more a feel of random terror and malice, bringing to mind the van attack along Yonge St. in North York in April, — 10 dead, 16 with non-fatal injuries, some of them grievous.

What in God’s name is happening?

Murders, van attack, a lone gunman rampage, in a city that has always boasted of its safeness.

[This happened right on the block where I was born and raised. I've said often that Toronto was a great place to grow up - at least at the time I was growing up. It is definitely becoming nastier although it has a long way to go before it resembles any large US city. - prh. ed.]

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