Teenage girls charged with killing man in Toronto

The eight teenage girls, some as young as 13, made contact with one another on social media and may have never met before. But on Saturday night, they gathered in downtown Toronto and after getting into an altercation wound up surrounding and fatally stabbing a man in an apparent attack over a bottle of liquor, police said.

The killing, near the main transportation nexus in Canada’s largest city, was the latest and one of the most brazen episodes in the region in which people have been targeted randomly by groups of young attackers.

The 59-year-old victim has yet to be identified by authorities. He had been staying in homeless shelters since the fall, the police said, and on Saturday night he was outside a shelter in the Financial District when the suspects set their eyes on him.

The suspects — including three 13-year-olds, three 14-year-olds and two 16-year-olds — appeared to have stabbed him after attempting to steal a liquor bottle from him, Sgt. Terry Browne of the Toronto Police Service told the CBC Wednesday. All have been charged with second-degree murder.

The killing, which followed another criminal incident involving the teenagers that evening, was the culmination of a meeting that began online, the police said.

The girls had communicated with one another over social media before meeting in person Saturday evening in downtown Toronto, the police said, adding that they came from various parts of the city and did not appear to form a gang.

“We don’t know how or why they met on that evening and why the destination was downtown Toronto,” Browne said in a news conference Tuesday. “We don’t know how long they’ve been acquainted together.”

Early Sunday, the police responded to reports of a wounded man in downtown Toronto, a few blocks from the iconic CN Tower, the authorities said. The man was taken to a hospital, but he died from stab wounds.

The police described the attack on the man as “swarming type behavior” — in which victims have been robbed after being swarmed. Several robberies of that type occurred around Toronto this past summer, leading the police to beef up security in affected commercial areas.

The group of girls had been involved in another altercation involving “criminal behavior’’ before encountering the 59-year-old man, Browne said. Three of the girls had “prior contact” with the police before the killing, according to the authorities.

While robberies committed by groups of youths are not a new type of crime, the term used to describe it — “swarming” — is, said Jooyoung Lee, a sociologist at the University of Toronto and an expert on crime. The term — coupled with the stabbing of the man by teenage girls — fuels a misperception that violent crime is getting worse, Lee said.

“When there are these kinds of egregious, gratuitous forms of violence, they can warp people’s sensibilities about the safety of a city,” Lee said.

— The New York Times