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| Andrew Francis Wallace (Toronto Star) |
This is a case that angered many Torontonians and it happened on a city mass transit vehicle.
Nine bullets fired from Const.
James Forcillo’s gun, eight striking Yatim. The last six of those
bullets — fired after a five-second pause, as Yatim lay paralyzed and
dying from the first volley of shots — determined by a jury to be
attempted murder, and called “egregious” by an Ontario judge in a
scathing sentencing decision.
Alongside
Sammy’s mother, Sahar Bahadi, and sister Sarah, Yatim then watched as
Forcillo was handcuffed and taken to jail to serve a six-year sentence.
In
an exclusive interview Friday, a resigned anger could be heard in
Yatim’s voice. On Friday morning Forcillo, 33, was granted bail pending
an appeal of his conviction and sentence, after he spent his first and
only night in jail since the shooting.
“He gets to go home,” said Yatim. “My son sleeps in an urn.”
Yatim,
68, is thoughtful, articulate, reflective, but he struggles to explain
the pain of the past three years. “You go through hell and back — how I
can describe that more?”
Immediately after
getting the news of his son’s death while on a business trip in the
U.S., Yatim, a retail management consultant, says he took things hour by
hour, day by day. He became a “hermit,” never wanting to go out,
avoiding family and friends, because the subject was always the same.
