Aleisha Ashley, 17, and

Monique McKnight, 16

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Different Perspectives

Two teens dead in horrific crash; 
one an innocent bystander

TorontoSun.com
June 2, 2007

Two teenagers [Aleisha Ashley, left, and Monique McKnight] are dead and a third is clinging to life after an apparent early morning police pursuit in Rexdale Saturday.

Toronto Police remain tight lipped on the fatal collision because it is being probed by the province's Special Investigations Unit.

But SIU spokesman Rose Bliss confirmed officers were called to the Rexdale area just after 2 a.m. to investigate a gun call.

"Officers were patrolling the area near Islington Ave. and Albion Rd. to find the involved suspects," Bliss said. "While they were there, the officers noticed a blue Acura travelling north on Islington at a high rate of speed."

Officers in two marked police cruisers began to give chase up Islington but the pursuit came to a deadly end only moments later, Bliss said.

The Acura smashed into two eastbound taxis in the intersection at Finch Ave. W. and then crashed into a light pole.

One of the cabs had two young passengers in the backseat, Bliss said. A 16-year-old girl was pronounced dead at the scene and her friend, 17, was rushed to Sunnybrook hospital in critical condition.

"It's not looking good," Bliss said of the surviving teen.

The lone occupant of the Acura, which was left wrapped around a lamp post in a mangled heap, died in hospital. Bliss said he was only 15 and SIU investigators have since determined the Acura was allegedly stolen.

The drivers of the two cabs escaped serious injury. Both have been released from hospital.

The entire area for several blocks has been cordoned off and has created traffic chaos.

The SIU said they are still trying to determine what role if any police played in the crash.

____________

The chase, the taxi

and a neighbourhood in mourning

by MARGARET PHILP and OMAR EL AKKAD 
GLOBE and MAIL 
JUNE 4, 2007

TORONTO — Monique and Aleisha were best friends taking a taxi home from a relative's house in the early hours of Saturday morning. They would never know it, but they shared many mutual friends with the 15-year-old boy racing blindly toward them in a stolen Acura being chased by two police cruisers. The three teens had even grown up in the same northwest Toronto neighbourhood. 

The stolen car smashed into Monique and Aleisha's taxi at 2 a.m. on Saturday. By the time the sun came up, two of the three teens were dead and the third in hospital, clinging to life. 

Friends have identified Monique McKnight - a 16-year-old Grade 11 student at Toronto's Emery Collegiate Institute - as the teenager instantly killed in the collision, which took place when the stolen car crashed into two taxi cabs near the intersection of Finch and Islington in northwest Toronto. 

Seated next to Ms. McKnight was her best friend, 17-year-old Aleisha Ashley. Ms. Ashley was in critical condition at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre yesterday. [Aleisha also succumbed to her injuries.] The 15-year-old boy driving the stolen car was also taken to hospital, but died a few hours later. 

Friends flocked to cyberspace to remember Ms. McKnight, a girl described as a "sweetheart" who was funny and had a smile that "could light up a room." 

"I couldn't believe it when I heard it. She was such a nice person she really didn't deserve to die," a friend named Vanessa said yesterday. "I just saw her and she was fine, now [she's] gone. ... Monique was one of the nicest people anyone could ever meet." 

The 15-year-old boy who slammed into the taxis was speeding northbound in a stolen blue Acura on Islington Ave. near Finch in Etobicoke about 2 a.m. when two marked police cars, responding to a gun call, started a chase. After the collision, the teenage driver was taken to Sunnybrook, where he died from his injuries five hours later. The drivers of the two taxis escaped with minor injuries.

Friends of the 15-year-old driver described him as a social young man who grew up near the site of Saturday's crash and attended Monsignor Percy Johnson Catholic High School. Many of his friends last saw the teenager late Friday night, when he attended a prom after-party.

Because of the two deaths, 12 investigators from the province's Special Investigations Unit have taken over the case from the Toronto Police Service, whose officials remain tight-lipped. Two Toronto police officers involved in the chase are being investigated, while five others are considered witnesses in the probe into whether police should be charged in the crash.

The deaths are rekindling debate about the wisdom of police launching high-speed chases, some of which have killed and maimed scores of innocent bystanders over the years.

In recent years, following public outcry over the deaths of people mowed down by out-of-control vehicles fleeing pursuing officers, police services across North America have adopted tougher rules governing police chases. 

In Ontario, new regulations to the Police Act were passed seven years ago that compel officers to weigh the urgency of arresting a suspect against the risk to public safety of a high-speed chase.

Different Perspectives

Two Editorials

Police chases not worth risk of tragedy by Margery Eagan Boston Globe Columnist This editorial is no longer posted on the Boston Globe Web site "Here’s yet another question: would you prefer someone driving through Boston erratically at 40 mph, or chased by police,  at 70 or 80 mph?"     May 31, 2007—Explain this, please: Because about 100 children a year are abducted and killed by strangers, we have totally revamped American childhood. “Good” parents won’t even let children in the back yard alone.     Yet at least that many innocent Americans, including children (some estimate two or three times as many) are killed every year in police chases. And every time I’ve written a column asking if these chases are worth it, the response is the same.     Surely I am insane.     Really? Two innocent bystanders killed;  one permanently injured     The latest police chase tragedy came early Sunday morning when Javier Morales, 29, refused to stop for a state trooper in Everett. Morales made an illegal left turn off Route 16. He had no license and feared jail time for a previous no-license arrest.     Perhaps if he faced greater jail time for refusing to stop for police — a penalty many have proposed to reduce these chases — Morales, weighing his options, would have made a different choice. To stop.     As it was, Trooper Joseph Kalil chased Morales’ stolen SUV from Everett to Somerville’s Davis Square, where Morales plowed into a cab driven by Walid Chahine, 45, a husband and father. In the backseat were musician Paul Farris, 23, and his girlfriend Katelyn Hoyt. Hoyt and Chahine [Walid Chahine died at the hospital.] are at Mass. General, critically injured. Farris is dead.     The fourth victim: Trooper Kalil, who must live with what happened for the rest of his days.     So why is it that state police here, and in many other states, chase traffic violators at all? Boston police don’t. Neither do police in many other big cities, in part because of the risk of multimillion-dollar lawsuits. Boston’s pursuit standards are higher than those followed by state police: Boston is supposed to chase only violent or dangerous suspects or those driving erratically, possibly because of drugs or alcohol.     Here’s yet another question: would you prefer someone driving through Boston erratically at 40 mph, or chased by police, at 70 or 80 mph?     One more question: Why do we assume that chasing even dangerous criminals is always worth the risk of maiming or killing a pedestrian or family in a minivan? Myth vs. Fact     The myth, by the way, is that police typically or even regularly chase the dangerous, “that there’s a dead body in the trunk,” says Geoffrey Alpert of the University of South Carolina, who’s studied police pursuits since 1983.     The fact is, between 75 and 80 percent of chases occur after moving violations, says Alpert. “They’re mostly young kids who’ve made stupid decisions. The more powerful tool for police? Turn off the lights and siren and it’s more likely the suspect will slow down.”     I guess the idea of letting the bad guy get away seems un-American. Perhaps, too, the car chase is too rooted in American legend, from “The French Connection” to O.J. to whatever live police pursuit Fox and MSNBC can find and broadcast.     And perhaps politicians don’t want to buck police. And then there’s adrenaline: If you’ve heard a chase on a police radio, you know want I’m talking about.     Yesterday Pearl Allen, a retired music and Afro-American studies teacher at John D. O’Bryant School, said what many say who lose family to police pursuits. That if police hadn’t chased, her grandson “would still be alive.”     Quentin Osbourne, once a standout for the Boston Raiders Pop Warner team, was 15 when he was ejected from a Hyundai Elantra he and six friends had piled into.     The 16-year-old unlicensed driver ran a stop sign. Police chased. He drove into a brick wall.     “They were just kids,” his grandmother said. “(The police) put on the flashing blue light. I think the driver got scared and sped away, and they just kept chasing until they crashed.”

National Post editorial board on high-speed police chases by Jonathan Kay National Post Editorial June 04, 2007—The numbers sound damning: In the past decade, nearly 20 by-standing Ontarians have been killed by vehicles being pursued at high speeds by local police officers, nine in Toronto, alone. That sum includes two teenage girls tragically killed this past weekend when the taxi in which they were riding was struck by a driver fleeing police. Toronto Mayor David Miller and Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty have been quick to condemn police-chase policies, implying that officers — rather than the criminals they were pursuing — are to blame. But before police reform their high-speed chase procedures as the mayor and premier have demanded, consider that in every previous deadly Toronto chase, the car being chased was stolen. In most cases, it was already traveling at high speed when police engaged it. They typically had pursued it for only a short while (in most cases under two minutes) before it crashed. And in every incident, either the courts or the Ontario Provincial Police’s Special Investigations Unit (SIU) absolved officers of any responsibility. While it is too early to tell officially, initial reports of this past weekend’s crash, which claimed the lives of best friends Aleisha Ashley, 17, and Monique McKnight, 16, would seem to fit this pattern. Chevon Josephs, 15, also killed, was already driving a vehicle he had allegedly stolen at very high speed down a busy street in north Toronto when he was spotted by police. They gave chase. Before their cruisers could engage his car, though, Joseph slammed into Ashley’s and McKnight’s cab in the same intersection in which two innocent people were killed when their car was struck by a stolen van being pursued by police in Sept. 2002. Since 2000, Ontario police, including Toronto’s, have been governed by a province-wide policy on chases. The manual calls on any officer contemplating a rapid pursuit to consider three factors: The officer must have reason to believe a criminal offence has been or is about to take place. There must be no alternatives to the chase. And the immediate need to identify the driver or the vehicle, or stop the driver from harming the public, must outweigh the risk to public safety. Introduced by the Mike Harris government following a spate of spectacular police-chase crashes, this simple policy has significantly reduced deaths from pursuits. Some might argue that we need a policy that bans high-speed chases outright. But this would be a false humanitarian savings — since such a policy would encourage violent crime by signaling to criminals that they can always get away from cops simply by flooring their accelerator. There is another option, however: police helicopters for Toronto. Vancouver, Calgary and Edmonton police have all halved or more than halved chase deaths since the introduction of helicopters in those cities. Officers hovering in the air can stealthily follow stolen vehicles without provoking the driver to drive away faster. To their credit, both Messrs. Miller and McGuinty tempered their calls for a crackdown on police by saying they would wait for the result of an SIU investigation of police actions in last weekend’s crash. But neither man laid any blame on the alleged car thief, and both said nonetheless that a review of police procedures was long overdue. Despite their legalistic caveats, both men left the impression he felt officers had unnecessarily worsened the outcome. There is no reason to believe police are in any way to blame. Most citizens would complain if police let speeding stolen vehicle roar around the streets unmolested. They would demand police protect them from the threat, which is exactly what Toronto police appear to have been doing when Josephs’ actions took two young lives. If Messrs. Miller and McGuinty truly want to safeguard the public, they will stop blaming cops for the havoc caused by crooks, and start investigating whether our uniformed protectors might not need help from above.