Why?Such a tiny word. A piddling monosyllable. Three measly letters.But a question that looms as large today as anything Toronto authorities have ever faced, as the city struggles to grasp the salient facts behind Monday’s Yonge St. massacre.On Tuesday, as handcuffed suspect Alek Minassian, 25, appeared briefly in a Toronto courtroom to be formally charged with 10 counts of murder and 13 counts of attempted murder, his darting eyes and poker face offered no hint of motive.Yet as new clues emerged, a fragmented portrait began to take shape with disturbing glimpses into the life of the man charged with wilfully racing a rented Ryder van along a 2.2-kilometre stretch of North York sidewalk, causing widespread carnage.When the world’s gaze first settled on Toronto as Monday’s chaos took hold, conclusion-leapers online were quick to declare the city a victim of the Islamic State and/or like-minded jihadists. The attack, they argued, bore all the hallmarks of Nice, France, where a 19-tonne truck tore through crowds celebrating Bastille Day two years ago, killing 86 people and triggering three days of national mourning. Those first baseless, Islamophobic assumptions melted away quickly enough — only to be replaced with new social media notions, none evidently tethered to fact. Everything from Armenian nationalism (the attack came on the eve of Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day) to autism (the suspect is believed to be on the spectrum, a fact that health professionals emphasize carries no correlation to violence) to outright misogyny were offered up as working theories.On Tuesday afternoon, as police confirmed Minassian would be charged with a 14th count of attempted murder, suspicions hardened toward the grim possibility that a virulent hatred of women was behind the tragedy.At the centre of that suspicion is a Facebook post first believed by many to be a hoax — only to be authenticated by Facebook itself as real. Toronto police, however, ...
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