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Creba verdict caught in the crossfire

The final verdicts in the Jane Creba shooting – three trials, nine charged, four convicted of second degree murder and manslaughter – raise an all-too-obvious question.

Did the cops overreach, cast their net too wide to snare the culprits?

It’s an age-old investigative tool used by police. Arrest enough suspects and eventually they’ll start turning on each other to save their own skin.

It hasn’t gone unnoticed, that eight of the nine defendants in the 2005 Boxing Day shooting incident are black, and that Creba was a pretty blonde-haired, blue-eyed white girl.

To cast the cops’ or Crown’s prosecution of the case in racial terms is tempting, but probably too easy.

I say probably because there’s little doubt the public shock and outrage over the shooting in a year when gun crimes were at an all-time high (remember the Summer of the Gun?) set the stage for ample public hysteria. Soon the Guardian Angels were patrolling downtown streets.

Law and order types had a field day characterizing the shooting as the day a city lost its innocence. Hardly.

The media said the same thing about Jordan Manners when he was gunned down in the hallway of a North York school two years ago. That case ended in a mistrial a few days ago, a mother, a city still left grasping for answers.

Looking for some larger significance in such incidents, our instinct when the incomprehensible occurs is to try and offer an explanation, make some sense of it all. Sometimes we’re just looking for a bogeyman to blame.

Truth is, there’s often no rhyme or reason to these senseless acts, no larger meaning than that they happen.

Before Creba there was Vivi Leimonis, the innocent bystander turned victim in the fabled Just Desserts shooting whose untimely end prompted a similar outpouring. Back then, lax immigration laws were blamed for her death.

Creba got caught in a crossfire between rival gangs, reportedly.

But judging by the comments offered by a key Crown witness in the case, a few sideways glances between gun-toting gangster wannabes – it’s still unclear what previous incident or incidents prompted the bad blood – is what triggered the hail of bullets that left Creba dead and six others injured. Nothing more, nothing less.

The tragedy of it all makes us need to believe her death was about something more.

If we as a city really want some good to come out of Creba’s death, we should be using it to push for a national handgun ban.[rssbreak]

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