Update January 31, 2023: After an MRI showed no brain activity, our friend is being taken off life support. We’re gutted. I hope that re-publishing this photo will help identify the person suspected of assaulting him.

It’s so ironic. All his working life, our friend tried to help society’s disadvantaged and struggling and lost. Now it seems likely that one of these people has taken his life.

As I wrote earlier:

A friend of many years was violently assaulted this week in one of the shocking number of unprovoked assaults committed lately in Toronto, both on the streets and public transit. From what we’ve been told, our friend was walking along the Danforth near Jones Avenue shortly before 4 p.m. on Tuesday when a young man randomly pushed him into a large concrete planter. Our friend fell into the planter and suffered two broken ribs along with a punctured lung. On Thursday, after two days in Michael Garron hospital, he was sent home. There he felt unwell and managed to call 911. Afterward, our friend went Into cardiac arrest. His heart was started again at the hospital after 35 minutes, and he is now on life support back in the ICU.

No arrest has been made, but I’m writing this to publish the photograph of a suspect that has been released by police. He is described as in his 20s, about 6 feet tall and of slim build. When last seen, he was wearing a red paper mask with flames on it, a black sweater and black pants. If you have any information, please contact police at 416-808-5500, Crime Stoppers anonymously at 416-222-TIPS (8477), or at www.222tips.com. We don’t want this to happen to anyone else.

Our friend is frail, having survived several bouts with cancer (and radiation, and chemotherapy).  Since he had suffered from lung cancer, getting his ribs broken and a lung punctured was bound to be serious. An assailant couldn’t know this, but I think he must have noticed our friend’s unsteady gait and vulnerability. In the same way, the assailant who assaulted and killed an 89-year-old woman in Toronto’s downtown core a few days earlier must have known she was unable to defend herself. They took down people who couldn’t fight back.

Safe, boring Toronto has changed. The Toronto Star recently published a very long list of all the assaults on transit users and employees over the past year. You can find it here. In today’s Globe and Mail, Marcus Gee writes an excellent column about a recent unprovoked assault on a woman living in the Regent Park area who was walking her dog.

The woman, Nicky Lightstone, brings up the central issue: the fact that Toronto’s services to help people struggling with mental illness, addiction to drugs and homelessness are increasingly underfunded and in crisis. Ms. Lightstone sits on the board of harm-reduction agency that aids people struggling with drugs. She says she supports more funding for preventative measures, not the extra funding for police that Mayor John Tory has recently provided in response to the increased violence.

Ms. Lightstone has no criticism of the officers who arrived to help her. But of course the police can only arrive in the aftermath of a violent street assault, they can’t stop it. It’s the preventative measures that can stop people like Ms. Lightstone and our friend from being hurt in the first place.

John Tory has been given “strong mayor” powers by Conservative Premier Doug Ford, anti-democratic powers that let him override the votes of councillors whom Torontonians like myself have elected. This means our right-wing mayor can ram through initiatives like a huge increase in police spending. If we were permitted this little thing called “democracy,” our city councillors might be able to craft a more effective alternative, supporting the type of preventative programs that Mayor Tory has long neglected. These look like separate issues–“strong mayor” powers and street assaults–but of course they’re connected. And the pandemic is probably in there somewhere too, destabilizing mental health.

Meanwhile, Torontonians are growing increasingly anxious about random violence in our city, myself included. I live only blocks away from the stretch of sidewalk where our friend was attacked, and that leaves me more than a little nervous about walking our once-safe streets.

Not that I’m walking, given my broken ankle. But I’m using a wheelchair for a couple more weeks, and that makes me pretty vulnerable to someone who’s cracked out, or having a psychotic break, or feeling mean or hopeless or desperate–and who isn’t getting any help. I don’t know what state our friend’s assailant was in when he was attacked. But the chances of the attacker being untroubled are pretty slim, and the chances of him needing help are correspondingly high.

As Ms. Lightstone says, “I feel like the system failed me because it failed him.” 

The person who assaulted our friend is still out there. Please circulate the photo and his description so we can stop further assaults. Possibly our own.