Victims remembered on fourth anniversary of Yonge St. van attack

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A virtual vigil was held at Mel Lastman Square in North York on Saturday to commemorate the fourth anniversary of the Yonge St. van attack.

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On April 23, 2018, Alek Minassian drove a rented van down a sidewalk on Yonge St., south of Finch Ave., killing ten people and injuring 16.

Minassian was convicted in 2021 of 10 counts of first-degree murder and 16 counts of attempted murder and will be sentenced on June 13.

Major John Tory says people’s lives were forever altered by the mass killing.

“This event profoundly affected first responders throughout the city and the community and it profoundly impacted the city itself and every single one of you,” Tory said Saturday. “But remarkably, truly remarkably, we came together as a community on that day and the days that followed to make sure it did not break our city’s spirit.”

“The memory of this attack continues to resonate with us. We will not forget the victims. We must not forget the victims lost to this senseless act of violence fueled by misogamy,” he added.

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Anne Marie D’Amico, 30, a financial analyst, Dorothy Sewell, 80, a retiree, Beutis Renuka Amarasinghe, 45, a nutritionist, Munir Najjar, 85, a Jordanian retiree visiting family, Chul Min “Eddie” Kang, 45, a chef, Mary Elizabeth “Betty” Forsyth, 94, a retiree, So He Chung, 22, a University of Toronto student, Andrea Knafelc Bradden, 33, a Slovenian-Canadian account executive, Geraldine Brady, 83, an Avon saleswoman, and Ji Hun Kim, 22, a Seneca College student from South Korea, all died in the attack.

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Aleksandra Kozhevnikova, 92, was severely injured in the attack and died two years later.

During the vigil the doctors nurses and paramedics were thanked and a poem was read called We Remember them for the lives lost and injured.

The We Love Willowdale site also remembered.

“We remember the news that something frightening was happening in the heart of our community. We remember the relief a short time later that the perpetrator had been caught. We remember the sound of helicopters that sometimes felt like a war zone. We remember the emptiness and eerie silence on Yonge Street,” the site posted.

“We remember orange tarps on the ground covering those who had lost their lives. We remember losing our collective innocence as a community that this kind of tragedy could happen at our door steps. We remember strangers caring for strangers in ways we had never seen before.”

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Cathy Riddell wants to move on, but the justice system has kept her stuck in time.

She hopes other victims of crime don’t have to endure what she and more than a dozen other survivors — and numerous grieving relatives — of the worst attack in Toronto’s history have gone through.

It’s been four years since Riddell was attacked by Minassian who, angered by women who wouldn’t sleep with him and radicalized in the bowels of the internet, deliberately drove a rented van down a busy Toronto sidewalk.

Yet the criminal case stretches on.

“Nowhere along the line is there any true consideration of victims,” Riddell said in a recent interview. “We just don’t matter.”

“I really have had enough, I carried the burden long enough,” she said. “I want to move on from it somehow. I want to get my life back on track and if the court isn’t going to help me do that, then I’m going to do it on my own.”

— With files from CP