Juno News - June 30, 2019


Canadians deserve answers on the Danforth Shooting

Topics
Danforth shooting investigation
Mentioned
Faisal Hussain Thorncliffe Danforth
Celebrating citizenship isn't offensive Happy Canada Day! Happy Dominion Day!

Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

140.3

Word count

718

Sentence count

37

Harmful content

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

The Toronto Police released a 23-page report into their investigation into the July 22, 2018, Danforth shooting by Faisal Hussain. The report is detailed, as one would expect, but the single-paragraph conclusion, stating they were unable to find a motive, left more questions than the previous 22 pages answered.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 The Toronto Police this week released a 23-page report into their investigation into the July 22, 2018 Rampage Danforth shooting by 29-year-old Faisal Hussain.
00:00:21.460 The report is detailed, as one would expect, but the single-paragraph conclusion, stating they were unable to find a motive, left more questions than the previous 22 pages answered.
00:00:33.620 The report details all of the items seized by the police in their initial search of the Thorncliffe apartment, where the shooter lived with his Pakistani-born parents.
00:00:43.620 Clearly, there was evidence turned up in the investigation that Hussain dealt drugs.
00:00:47.740 But they also turned up magazines and ammunition for weapons never found.
00:00:53.500 The report doesn't explain why that was, why the weapons were never found, or what efforts were taken to try and track them down.
00:01:02.540 Chief among these is the AK-47 semi-automatic rifle associated to the loaded AK magazine that they did find.
00:01:11.480 Where was that weapon?
00:01:12.440 They also found loaded magazines for other weapons, and no info was provided relative to the weapons that they were for.
00:01:21.640 The report refers to searching for a storage locker, but provides no further information.
00:01:26.960 The police refer to foreign travel done by Hussain, but the report doesn't explain anything further.
00:01:35.020 We know from media reports at the time, citing police sources, that he had traveled to Pakistan, but we don't know exactly when or for how long.
00:01:44.100 And the report doesn't detail anything further, save and accept to say that detectives are prepared to travel wherever as needed.
00:01:52.160 That seems a little strange to me, inasmuch as Canada has intelligence assets in Pakistan that track the movements of Canadians coming and going, what they do, who they meet, and that sort of thing.
00:02:07.760 One would think that the Toronto Police would have followed that line of investigation, and perhaps they did.
00:02:13.140 The problem with that, and I said this at the time in viewing videos of the active shooter situation, is that he must have had some level of training.
00:02:28.400 He calmly walked through the streets of Toronto's Greek town, indiscriminately firing into shops, restaurants, and at pedestrians that he encountered. 0.94
00:02:35.420 We know he had at least seven magazines for the Smith & Wesson .40 cal semi-auto pistol he was using.
00:02:43.400 He purchased those in April, according to the police report.
00:02:46.900 This would have given him somewhere between 70 and 105 rounds of ammunition, depending on the size of the clips.
00:02:54.580 Clearly in the video, he is seen emptying the weapon, and as he continued calmly walking, ejecting spent magazines,
00:03:02.040 inserting another, racking a new round, and shooting more.
00:03:06.520 This would be totally, in my view, virtually impossible for a neophyte to guns to do.
00:03:13.640 Police uncovered nothing to indicate he had any training, or indeed the appropriate documentation Canadians need to purchase firearms,
00:03:22.620 which includes rudimentary training.
00:03:24.660 So, where did he get the training he did have?
00:03:29.160 The police report is mute on that subject.
00:03:32.640 The forensic digital analysis that police conducted on various phones and devices they seized,
00:03:39.760 except for vague references to a vague fascination with 9-11 and the Columbine school shooting,
00:03:45.820 but really, anyone can get access to anything on the internet, at their local library or internet cafe,
00:03:52.940 so that really doesn't tell us the whole tale.
00:03:57.900 ISIS did claim responsibility for the shooting, and the report sheds no light on that.
00:04:04.800 It does talk about issues he had with the mental health system years earlier,
00:04:09.980 and says he was diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder.
00:04:13.880 It also says he had taken, in the past, psychotropic meds,
00:04:18.280 leaving the impression, without actually saying it, that mental illness was the reason for the violent rampage.
00:04:24.480 Now, I'm not close enough to the investigation to draw a conclusion of any sort.
00:04:29.680 What I can say is I still have many unanswered questions after reading the police investigation report.
00:04:35.580 What caused him to walk down Toronto streets, indiscriminately shooting innocent people,
00:04:41.180 wounding 13 and killing two, including a little girl, is chief among them. 0.73
00:04:47.780 For True North, I'm Leo Knight.
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