Markus Grupp’s Friday night started with drinks and dinner, and ended with him witnessing the fatal police shooting of 18-year-old Sammy Yatim on an empty 505 Dundas streetcar.
Grupp, 36, was walking home with his brother and his brother’s girlfriend just before midnight when the three found themselves in the midst of commotion on Dundas St. W. They had crossed Trinity Bellwoods Park and were headed east on Dundas towards the brother’s Bellwoods Ave. home, when they came upon a parked westbound streetcar.
“The lights were flashing,” said Grupp. “We saw a lot of people on the north side along the storefronts on Dundas, all kind of standing there. Some had their phones out, some were just standing there talking.”
The streetcar was empty save for a young man in the front seat on the right of the vehicle. The operator of the streetcar was “standing hunched over the controls,” according to Grupp, who was watching about three metres away from the front doors of the car.
Police officers are gathered outside a TTC streetcar on Dundas St. W. early Saturday in this still taken from a video shot on an iPhone by Markus Grupp of the altercation that left 18-year-old Sammy Yatim dead.
About 30 seconds later, “the operator jumped off and the fellow in the front right seat jumped up. The fellow was standing up — he was in plain view of the front right window. We saw him and we saw he was holding up a knife at that point.
“That’s when the police showed up,” said Grupp, who then took out his iPhone and started recording. “I started filming then, at 12:03.”
Grupp said, initially, there were three officers — two males and one female. Within seconds, several more cruisers arrived and officers surrounded the streetcar. Grupp estimates there were between eight and 11 officers around the car at that point.
In Grupp’s video, officers near the front doors of the streetcar can be heard shouting “Drop the knife!” at least half a dozen times. Yatim, the young man on the streetcar, can be heard retorting, “You’re a . You’re a f------ .” The officers, weapons drawn, shout back “Don’t move!” on two occasions. But mere seconds later, when Yatim appears to move, police fire three consecutive shots into the streetcar, followed by at least another six.
“We didn’t know if they were real bullets or not,” Grupp said. “We didn’t really think they were real bullets.” He added that it was unclear if the shots were fired by a single officer or if several discharged their firearms. “All we could see was their silhouettes so it was hard to tell.”
About 20 seconds after the shots were fired, an officer climbed into the streetcar and Grupp heard the sound of a Taser, as police continued to shout “Drop the knife!” Grupp’s video also shows one officer sprinting into the streetcar and towards Yatim.
“We saw one of the officers go in the back door, putting on gloves,” Grupp said. “He was hidden below the waist but it looked like, at one point, there was a kicking motion, interpreting from his upper body motions.”
“Then a bunch of officers went to the front. One officer went below the window, kind of crouched down below the window,” he said, adding that the officer seemed to be performing CPR on the victim.
About two minutes after the first shots were fired, police began cordoning off the area. Grupp was giving his statement to a police officer, when another officer came up and told his colleague to “shut it down.” Toronto Fire arrived on the scene but Grupp says he doesn’t recall if he saw Emergency Medical Services personnel boarding the streetcar while he was speaking with police. But, according to Grupp’s recollection, Yatim’s body was still on the streetcar when he left the scene at about 12:35 a.m.
