John O’Keefe spent the last minutes of January 11, 2008, sharing a beer with half a dozen friends at the Duke of Gloucester. Two blocks south of Bloor on Yonge Street, the Duke was O’Keefe’s island of familiarity in the bustling anonymity of downtown. A 42-year-old manager of Healthy’s, a vitamin store in the Exchange Tower, he had met a group of friends for an after-work drink.

At about 1 a.m., despite calls from his friends and the bartender to have one for the road, O’Keefe left the pub and headed up Yonge toward the subway. He lived on the Danforth with his partner, Susan Banahan, and his plan was to take his son Iain skating the next morning. As he made his way up the street, two young men—a 22-year-old student named Edward Paredes and his 23-year-old friend, Awet Zekarias—were being forced out of the Brass Rail, a block north. There were a dozen or so people milling about in front of the strip club at the time. They saw the pair scuffle with the bouncer and claim Zekarias egged his buddy on. Paredes allegedly pulled from his waistband a registered Baby Desert Eagle 9 mm—a small-format version of an Israeli-made semi-automatic handgun, which he often took to a shooting range in Scarborough.

O’Keefe, bundled up against the cold and listening to his iPod, was walking by just as Paredes fired. The bullet hit him in the head, killing him instantly. Paredes and Zekarias fled down Charles Street. Later that day, they were caught and charged with first-degree murder.

O’Keefe’s death was only one of a handful of high-profile shootings in the first half of this year. Another happened on January 17, the after­noon of O’Keefe’s funeral, when Hou Chang Mao, a 47‑year-old grocer, was caught in a gunfight while stacking oranges in front of a Chinatown East supermarket. Then, on the evening of March 28, an 18-year-old woman was shot in the leg on a subway car pulling into Spadina station—the first shooting to take place on a TTC train. In June, 25-year-olds Dylan Ellis and Oliver Martin, heading home from watching a basketball game at a friend’s apartment, were gunned down in their Range Rover near Trinity-Bellwoods Park. At press time, the police had arrested two men in connection with the subway shooting, but there had been no breaks in the murders of Mao, Ellis and Martin.

By John Lorinc

TORONTO LIFE - August 2008