An avalanche of frightening victim impact statements was read in the minutes at the Toronto Supreme Court as the sentencing hearing in the case began. Eight women and two men lost their lives on April 23, 2018 when a 25-year-old man bent down for defamation, angry with women who did not sleep with him and radicalized in the depths of the internet deliberately drove a rented van to a busy sidewalk in the city center. Another woman died more than three years later from injuries she suffered that day. The hearing of the sentence for Alek Minasyan is going to be heard by many dozens of people who were affected by the attack. So Ra was one of them. She and her best friend, Sohe Chung, were walking down Yonge Street that day because they thought the weather was too good to take the subway. In a victim’s statement read in court, Ra said her last memory was waiting for a light to change – then she woke up on the ground, full of blood and in excruciating pain, panting. She found her friend on the ground a few meters away, without moving. Ra was rushed to Sunnybrook Hospital where she was diagnosed with concussion and key bone fracture. She said almost all the bones in her face were broken, except for her forehead. The swelling was so severe from an orbital fracture that not a single eye could be opened. So Ra lost her best friend in the van attack in Toronto. She herself suffered extensive facial injuries. (Albert Leung / CBC) Through this pain, Ra continued to ask about her best friend, whom she described in the victim’s impact statement as her “soul mate”. “We connected on a soul level and so we did well,” he said. “I admired and loved her so much.” That was why her physical pain later subsided with the anguish of finding out that Chung had not survived. At that moment, he said, he really understood the grief. “When I heard about her death, my whole world fell apart,” he said. “I felt empty inside as if I had a huge hole in my heart that could not be filled.”
Automatic life imprisonment
For the victims and their families, this hearing marks the first opportunity to confront the killer in person after the trial and the verdict that took place alone by the judge via video conference during the pandemic. Betty Forsyth, Ji Hun Kim, Sohe Chung, Geraldine Brady, Chul Min Kang, Anne Marie D’Amico, Munir Najjar, Dorothy Sewell, Andrea Bradden, Beutis Renuka Amarasingha and Amaresh Tesfamariam died as a result of the attack. The killer was found guilty last year of 10 counts of first-degree murder and 16 counts of attempted murder. The first-degree murder carries an automatic sentence of life imprisonment without the possibility of applying for release from prison for 25 years. During the trial, which took place in 2020, the Crown stated that it was going to ask for successive life sentences. However, in May, Canada’s Supreme Court ruled that the 2011 Penal Code was unconstitutional, allowing judges to impose 25 years’ probation periods for each murder and not at the same time. Alek Minasyan, who was found guilty last year of 10 counts of first-degree murder and 16 counts of attempted murder, is scheduled to be heard by several dozen people affected by the attack. (Chris Young / Canadian Press)
A community disintegrated
Many citizens who provided cardiopulmonary resuscitation on stage also spoke during the morning court hearing and tearfully recounted how they still see the echo of what happened when they closed their eyes. Jiaxin Jiang told the court that the horror she saw that day changed her life forever. Jiang performed cardiopulmonary resuscitation on a victim who died on the scene, leaving her with “years of guilt and self-doubt as a trained health professional,” she said. “I was repeating the sequence of events that day thousands of times in my mind, wondering if I could have done things differently and if I was still here today.” Tania Kouzos was another respondent, who told the court that she was still patient, seeing the fear and confusion on the victims’ faces and hearing the panic in their voices. Her voice, Kouzos said, was the last one anyone ever heard. “I live with the thought, ‘Could I do more to help?’ They are guilt and remorse that I still feel though [this was] “caused by someone else’s bad choices,” he said. Judge Anne Molloy’s voice was broken several times as she made sure to thank each person who spoke in court individually. “I admire your courage. I am very sorry for what happened to you,” said the presiding judge in Jiang.
