Juno News - October 26, 2022


The sad reality of what’s taking place on Toronto’s streets

Mentioned
Jane Rick Craddock John Tory Tony
WHAT？ Reuters ＂fact checked＂ True North？ Justin Trudeau is laughing at you

Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

179.03

Word count

1,133

Sentence count

93

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

On this episode of the podcast, I sit down with a man who was nearly killed by a dog walker, and tells the story of how he managed to survive the attack, and how he was almost left for dead.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Behind me is the Bond Hotel, one of three hotels owned by the Silver Hotel Group,
00:00:06.440 which was used as a homeless shelter over the past two years during the pandemic.
00:00:12.220 It has since been sold to the City of Toronto for an undisclosed, ungodly, no doubt, sum,
00:00:18.760 and will be converted into affordable housing.
00:00:22.200 Meanwhile, until that happens, the drug dealers continue to apply their trade outside the hotel,
00:00:27.980 and the mayhem at this corner is unbelievable, particularly at night.
00:00:34.940 This hotel shelter is within walking distance of the condo where Rick Craddock and his lovely wife reside.
00:00:42.760 Rick was brutally beaten and nearly left for dead back in May.
00:00:48.520 Jane and I have a friend of ours that's in the restaurant business.
00:00:51.400 Jane came home that night and she says, oh, Tony's at this restaurant, we've got to go see him.
00:00:54.840 So I said, okay, let me just take the dog for a quick walk.
00:00:58.340 I came down and I got to the corner of the building and one of my neighbors came running down to ask me a question.
00:01:07.540 And while we were standing talking, we could hear all this yelling and screaming going on down, you know, to the north of us.
00:01:15.740 And when I got to the kids' playground, what was happening is the building next door to us was a co-op and they had balconies.
00:01:22.880 And the people were on their balconies yelling at these two fellows because their dog was in the kids' playground.
00:01:29.720 And, you know, it's like doing all its business.
00:01:33.120 And there's signs all over the place, no dogs allowed, and it's City of Toronto.
00:01:37.560 And as I was walking by, I stopped and I said to the fellows, you know, they're right.
00:01:43.860 He said, I said, you need to listen to them.
00:01:45.500 You shouldn't have your dog in here.
00:01:46.940 You know, this is really not the place to have it.
00:01:50.020 You know, kids play in here daily.
00:01:52.640 And he's yelling and screaming at me that, well, it's a service dog.
00:01:56.220 And I know darn well it wasn't a service dog.
00:01:59.460 So I went, well, whatever.
00:02:00.600 And as I started walking away, out of the corner of my eye, I caught him coming off because he was on top of where the slide is.
00:02:09.660 And he jumped down to the ground.
00:02:11.780 And I got to where the first gate is, and I just kind of held it shut with my hand so he couldn't open it.
00:02:17.220 So what he did was he climbed up on top of the fence, which has got to be a five-foot-high fence.
00:02:23.420 And how he got on top, I don't know.
00:02:24.700 But anyway, he got on top of the fence.
00:02:26.100 And, you know, I backed up away from him, and he just, it was like a wrestling match, you know, where the guy comes off the top rail.
00:02:35.520 Boom.
00:02:36.380 Took me down to the ground.
00:02:38.900 So while I was on the ground, stomped on my hand, broke my hand, and then this friend of his was holding him back.
00:02:48.120 And he kept saying to me, you need to get the hell out and get out of here.
00:02:50.760 Well, there were a lot of things that had happened I wasn't aware of, but I couldn't get up, and I couldn't stand up, you know.
00:02:58.120 So I finally got up, but I couldn't move.
00:03:01.040 And with that, he came back at me again, and he pushed me backwards.
00:03:06.400 And there's a couple of garbage cans, and they're chained to a steel post.
00:03:10.660 He pushed me backwards.
00:03:11.820 I hit my head on the post and knocked myself out.
00:03:14.160 And then I came to, and I thought, I'm going to call 911, and then I'll give my wife a call. 0.84
00:03:20.920 You know, you need to come down.
00:03:22.080 This is what's happening.
00:03:24.140 And I couldn't get through.
00:03:25.420 911 was busy.
00:03:27.360 But what it was, why it was so busy, is they received 30 calls in about 10 minutes about my meeting.
00:03:34.680 And there happened to be two plainclothes police officers were just over at Young Church in Dundas.
00:03:43.440 So they're like, wow, we're right there.
00:03:45.500 We're nice and close.
00:03:47.180 So they were the first ones here.
00:03:49.300 There was, all Mutual Street here was completely shut down.
00:03:53.460 There were like two or three fire trucks, ambulance.
00:03:56.760 I don't know how many police cars showed up.
00:03:59.060 It was unbelievable.
00:04:00.980 They just poured in.
00:04:02.300 I was rushed into St. Mike's Hospital.
00:04:04.680 I called Jane.
00:04:06.840 Jane came down, got the dog. 0.99
00:04:08.820 She ran up, dropped the dog off, and then met me at the emergency.
00:04:13.820 So while I'm in there, of course, they did an MRI.
00:04:17.280 They did CAT scan.
00:04:18.640 They did all kinds of stuff.
00:04:20.720 Now, the thing was, while I was there, I had no feeling in my legs.
00:04:27.280 Yeah, from, you know, from my waist down.
00:04:31.740 And I thought, wow, this is weird.
00:04:33.720 So the doctor then came back out with the results of the MRIs and everything.
00:04:37.900 And he just walked in and he said to Jane, and he goes, well, you broke your back.
00:04:41.840 Oh, is that when you tumbled into the...
00:04:45.180 No, I think that was when he came down off the top of the fence, because he came right 0.94
00:04:51.580 down on top of me.
00:04:53.400 And then I fell backwards with him on top of me.
00:04:57.040 And that's, I think that may be when it was, because when I tried to get up, I couldn't get up.
00:05:01.580 Does it traumatize you, or do you...
00:05:03.760 No, it doesn't, actually.
00:05:06.080 It doesn't at all, because I know, you know, the guy has been arrested by the police.
00:05:11.800 He has been charged.
00:05:13.100 The cop did tell us when he did come up to the emergency.
00:05:16.460 He did say that he's known to them, but he's never been violent before them.
00:05:20.620 But they do wellness checks, and he's one of the, on their list, right?
00:05:26.800 This, folks, is John Tory's Toronto, a city that has declined considerably under his watch
00:05:35.360 over the last eight years.
00:05:37.180 It's like a personal attack on the city of Toronto, okay?
00:05:40.820 It's always been a beautiful place.
00:05:42.920 And I, you know, I've traveled all around, and I always bragged about living in Toronto.
00:05:46.600 Well, I'm from Toronto, you know, great.
00:05:49.200 Now, I wouldn't dare tell anybody I'm from here.
00:05:52.220 The violence has just skyrocketed.
00:05:54.900 And I'm putting this in an eight-year, you know?
00:05:58.100 So John Tory's done two terms so far.
00:06:00.280 Yeah.
00:06:00.840 Hopefully, he's finished.
00:06:02.880 But, you know, he did two four-year terms, eight years, and that's when things really started to go sour.
00:06:09.080 Rick is one of the innocent victims of this cesspool.
00:06:13.400 Thankfully, he has survived to tell the tale.
00:06:17.900 For True North, I'm Sue Ann Levy.