WATCH ABOVE: York Regional police confirm 2 dead at Vaughan cafe shooting.
Two people were killed and two others were seriously injured during a brazen shooting at a café in Vaughan, north of Toronto Wednesday morning.
The double murder happened shortly after 8 a.m. inside the café near Islington Avenue and Highway 7, within a few kilometres as three other shootings over the last year.
It’s not yet clear what led up to the shooting or who was injured but York Regional Police Officer Const. Andy Pattenden said at a morning press conference “that a man arrived here and began shooting.”
Homicides in York Region are far less common than Toronto. York Regional Police, which patrols Vaughan, groups homicides with criminal negligence causing death in their annual report on crime statistics and says there were 14 deaths in 2014, compared to nine in 2013 and only seven in 2010. Last year’s 14 homicides represent a 85.5 per cent increase per 100,000 people since 2010.
The scene was just over a kilometre from the café where a “targeted killing” left one person dead and another injured in June 2014 at Baggio’s Café on Woodstream Boulevard. David Odesho, 24, was arrested in June 2014 and charged with first-degree murder and attempted murder. Sarhad Saddiq, 36, of Nobleton, Ontario was killed in that shooting.
And two months before that, a man was gunned down outside the Regina Sports Café on Regina Road, a few hundred metres from the June murder.
Adrian Humphreys, a reporter for The National Post, wrote at the time that it looked like “a mafia hit.”
The area, Humphreys wrote, was “known to have been frequented by organized crime figures in the past.”
Const. Pattenden said Wednesday it was “way too early in the investigation to be” connecting today’s shooting with organized crime.
Another person was gunned down near the Riocan Colossus Centre near Weston Road in May, 2014 just four kilometres from Wednesday’s shooting.
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