On consecutive nights this week, a man and woman were fatally shot.Both had their backs turned to the gunmen. Both were innocent victims.Neither was implicated in the crimes unfolding around them on opposite sides of the city: a neighbourhood war, and the slaying of an alleged gang member.Ruma Amar, 29, was shot in the back of the head as she and her husband and sister were leaving a North York bowling alley last Saturday. Two suspects had rained gunfire in what police say is a targeted shooting of another man, who was pronounced dead at the scene.In Etobicoke the night before, Nnamdi Ogba was approached from behind by assailants in what police are characterizing as a neighbourhood retaliation that led to the death of “an innocent man.” The 26-year-old was not even a resident of the Scarlettwood Ct. neighbourhood he was visiting last Friday. Shootings account for over half of city homicides. It’s unclear how many innocent people have been the victims of targeted shootings, but there have been at least 12 bystanders killed by errant bullets in Toronto in the last decade alone.“We always assume that the person who gets shot was implicated somehow in a crime,” said Jooyoung Lee, an associate professor at the University of Toronto. He added that crossfire “is part of the gun violence narrative we don’t hear enough about.”Toronto Police homicide Det. Sgt. Gary Giroux was the lead on two crossfire cases. A challenge for investigators handling cases of innocent shooting victims is offering an explanation to families, in some cases when a motive for the shooting is undetermined, he said. “I try to get them to wrap their head around something like having lost a family member under those circumstances … something so senseless, and so preventable, and unnecessary and all those other adjectives that you want to use, but it’s difficult to come up with an explanation,” the veteran investigator said. This ...
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