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In early May, a man was working with a landscaping crew in Overbrook when he noticed another young man walking near a teenage girl.
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He saw them walk past the workplace on Whitton Street. Minutes later, the girl walked determinedly towards the site, crying, with the young man chasing her.
The young man was clearly harassing the girl, who was covering her ears and screaming, according to the landscaper, whose identity is protected by a publication ban.
“He had followed her and was whispering things to her and she was screaming and covering her ears and saying, ‘Leave me alone!’ ‘Stop!’ And leave!'”
The young man was Joshua Graves. The 21-year-old was reportedly shot dead by police on the night of June 27 in the act of stabbing 19-year-old Catherine Ready. She had already killed her mother, Anne-Marie, 50, and her sister, Jasmine, 15.
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That double homicide occurred just three days after Graves was released by an Ottawa justice of the peace following his arrest on charges of criminal harassment, assault and sexual assault. The landscaper was going to be a witness in that case based on his experience at Whitton Street.
It was around 4 p.m. when the man decided to get involved in whatever was going on between Graves and the girl.
“It was when she was obviously distraught that she realized they weren’t friends,” he said of his decision to get involved. “That’s when she didn’t sit well with me. That’s when it’s like, ‘Okay, if no one else is going to do something, I’ll do something.’
The man is 6’3 tall, and Graves fled when he stood up and approached them.
“He just ran away,” he said.
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He described Graves as skinny, with shaggy dark brown hair and an ear piercing. He “he looked like a typical teenager”.
The man asked the girl, now curled up on the sidewalk, if she could sit down and talk.
“I was just trying to calm her down,” he explained. “My mother is a social worker and she always asks me: ‘When are you going to be a social worker?’”
The 16-year-old girl said she met Graves two years ago when she was a ninth grader. He was interested in her, but she wanted nothing to do with him after learning that she was 19 years old.
He sexually harassed her online, the man said, and after she blocked his posts, he showed up outside one of her classes and followed her home. According to the man, Graves told the girl that she couldn’t just block him out of her life. “I will always be here, I will always find you,” she said, according to the man’s account.
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The girl told her that Graves was sharing his graphic sexual fantasies about her when she ran from him on Whitton Street.
The man escorted the girl home and encouraged her to report the incident to the police.
“I said, ‘If you want something done, you’ll have to call the police.’ She was worried about retaliation.”
After he returned to his place of work and was packing to go home, the girl and her mother approached the man. The girl’s mother asked him to tell what happened. She promised to go to the authorities and took the man’s name and number so that the police could contact him as a possible witness.
Police contacted him later that night and he gave a formal statement two weeks later.
Late last month, the man recognized Graves’ name when he read an online story about the Alta Vista double homicide. He was relieved that the 16-year-old was not among the victims.
“I just said, ‘What the hell?’” he remembers. “That’s not something I really expected. It’s a nightmare. I’m still a bit in shock. He makes me wonder if he had weapons when I confronted him.”
The man said he was reprimanded by his landscaping company for being involved in the incident.
“I did not care. I said, ‘You know what? That’s why shit like this happens all the time. It’s because nobody does anything… If someone is upset and distressed, I will try to comfort them. It’s just who I am.”
