Toronto police took over an hour to respond to brutal assault, victim says

A Toronto man who says he was the victim of a brutal assault last month says police and paramedics took over an hour to respond to multiple 911 calls, and in that time, another person was attacked.

Peter Henry told CBC Toronto he was beaten on June 25 in the stairwell of the alternative housing building where he lives and works as the property manager. He says the assailant was the guest of a tenant and appeared to be on drugs.

The attack left him with four broken ribs, a fractured shin bone and a dislocated shoulder, he says. He says he waited for police and paramedics for about 40 minutes before deciding to take a taxi to a nearby hospital. 

Police arrived at the building on Mutual Street, south of Gerrard Street E., about an hour after he left, he says. But by then, a witness told CBC Toronto that the attacker had already choked another tenant and bitten off part of his earlobe.

"911 let us down … Toronto Police Services [has] let me down several times as a property manager. This is the worst," Henry said, sitting in a wheelchair. "This is really disturbing."

The attack raises questions about the police's 911 response times and whether they can keep up with demand. As CBC Toronto has previously reported, the volume of 911 calls has grown substantially in recent years, and response times have gotten longer. 

To address the problem, police launched an upgrade to the system in a bid to eliminate calls that were bogging down the emergency line and vowed to hire more people. Still, delays in emergency response times persist.

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"We're not protecting the most unprotected," Henry said. "That, to me, is a failure in the system."

Busy night across the city, police say 

In an emailed statement to CBC Toronto, police spokesperson Stephanie Sayer confirmed that the first of nine calls to 911 concerning the attack was made at 5:42 p.m. Police got to the apartment at 7:17 p.m.

Toronto police in the area and across the city were dealing with "an exceptionally high-volume evening," Sayer wrote.

"Officers in 51 Division were actively responding to multiple priority emergency calls during that same period, including a person armed with a knife, a threat of suicide, an intimate partner assault, multiple wanted persons, a person in crisis, and an Echo-tier call requiring an immediate joint response from police, fire, and paramedics, among others," she said. 

An Echo-tier call is among the highest priority levels assigned to 911 calls.

Shortly after officers arrived, they arrested a 32-year-old man with no fixed address, Sayer said, and confirmed there were two victims. One was assaulted inside the building, the other outside and both had serious but non-life threatening injuries. The suspect now faces nine charges, including aggravated assault, assault causing bodily harm and uttering death threats.

Henry wonders if emergency responders would have arrived sooner had he said something different to the 911 dispatcher.

"Maybe if I'd said 'There's weapons involved,' they might have," he said.

In the last year, the average police response time has fallen from 17 minutes to 13, Sayer said. Still, what happened that evening speaks to "real-time pressures faced by frontline officers responding to multiple high-priority emergencies in a large city like Toronto," she said.

"We are reviewing the circumstances around this call."

Toronto Paramedic Services is doing the same and also experienced more calls than usual that evening, spokesperson Jennifer Chung said in an email.

'The whole thing was just traumatizing'

The ordeal began with complaints from residents about a man who didn't live there, Henry said.

The first time Henry told him that he needed a resident escort to stay, everything was fine. But the second time he told the suspect to leave, he became violent, Henry said. 

The man chased him, kicked him down a set of stairs, punched and kicked him more as he lay on the ground, he said.

"I was banging on the door with my one hand that was free and screaming for help," Henry recounted. 

Suddenly, the man left, and eventually, a resident found Henry and called 911, he said.

If it wasn't for campus security at the nearby Toronto Metropolitan University jumping into action, the suspect wouldn't have been arrested, says Mark Jackson, a tenant who witnessed the incident and also serves as board president at Myrmex Non-Profit Housing Inc.

But by the time campus police arrived just after 7 p.m., "it was too little, too late," because another person had been assaulted outside the building and other people were put in danger, Jackson said.

He calls the police's response time 'unconscionable."

"It was absolutely horrendous, unacceptable and very potentially even more tragic than it was," he said. "The whole thing was just traumatizing and tragic."

This isn't the first time the building has faced safety concerns, Henry and Jackson said, but Myrmex can't afford to hire security.

Henry says he's hoping to talk to Mayor Olivia Chow about the issue and intends to make a formal complaint with the police.

"I don't want anybody having to deal with this ever again," he said.