WATCH ABOVE: A former Toronto Investigator says the shooting at Muzik nightclub has all the earmarks of gang activity. The club revealed it has surveillance cameras and they were rolling last week when two people were fatally shot. Caryn Lieberman reports.
TORONTO — Muzik nightclub has confirmed that cameras were running inside the venue on the night of the shooting that left two dead and three injured in Toronto last week.
“We can confirm Muzik has cameras, and they were operating,” a spokesperson for the club said in a statement to Global News.
“We are fully cooperating with the police investigations. It is up to the police to determine what footage from those cameras is useful to them, and what, if anything, will be made public.”
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Duvel Hibbert, 23, of Brampton, and Ariela Navarro-Fenoy, 26, of Toronto were fatally shot last Tuesday morning at around 3:20 a.m. after gunfire erupted at the OVO Fest after-party hosted by Toronto rapper Drake.
Hibbert was pronounced dead inside the nightclub’s outdoor patio area while Navarro-Fenoy was shot north of the Dufferin Gates. She later died in hospital from her injuries.
Three other people were injured during the gunfire, one from inside the nightclub, a second individual found just outside a fenced area near the venue, and a third victim located near Dufferin and College streets.
WATCH: Toronto Mayor John Tory makes an urgent appeal for anyone who was present at the Muzik nightclub the night of the deadly shootings to come forward to police.
Toronto Police Chief Mark Saunders expressed disappointment on Tuesday with the lack of information investigators have received from the public in the wake of the deadly shooting.
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“An appeal for video and pictures from the patrons of the club has yielded very little,” said Saunders.
“Only a few of the thousands of people in the club and immediate area have contacted the homicide investigators.”
Toronto Mayor John Tory added his voice to the plea for information from the public on Thursday, adding that it was up to the people of Toronto to provide answers to the families of the victims in the tragic shooting.
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“I have confidence that the people of Toronto will step up and do this because I think they know it’s the right thing to do in the interest of looking after and caring for each other and in the interest of making sure we maintain a safe community and frankly get whoever’s responsible for this off the streets and dealt with by the justice system.”
Dave Perry, a former Toronto homicide detective and co-founder of Investigative Solutions Network, said Thursday that video surveillance is a key piece of the investigation for police.
“It’s the first step in any kind of security endeavour is to make sure that you’re properly monitored to prevent an event, because they do act as a deterrent, but also if there ever is an event they can investigate properly,” he said.
“I can think of dozens of investigations where the key piece was that. Look at the shooting at the coffee shop in Vaughan just recently. They used that security video, put it out there … and put the warrant out for the individual wanted.”
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Perry added that the shooting has “all the earmarks of gang retaliation” and that photos and video from witnesses would also go a long way to help police solve the crime.
“These are some of the more difficult cases to solve because you have gang against gang and you have a community that’s embraced in fear and are afraid of retaliation so they don’t report,” he said.
“But as the chief of police accurately said, if people don’t start coming forward and cooperating with the police and we don’t continue to solve these cases — what’s left for us? The gangs will actually take over the streets and they’ll be able to act indiscriminately and we’ll have more mass shootings in public areas where innocent people are killed.”
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Saunders said Tuesday that both shooting locations have been connected forensically and that a woman injured in the shooting has since been released, while two men suffering “very serious injuries” still remain in hospital.
He added that one of the men managed to make his way to the Dufferin and College where he sought out help from a passing ambulance. Saunders declined to comment on whether the men injured in the shooting who remain in hospital are cooperating with police.
Muzik nightclub owner Zlatko Starkovski said last week that the venue was operating under its normal security protocol at the time of the shooting, with 73 professionally trained and provincially-licenced security guards on duty, two staff paramedics, 10 armed Toronto Police officers with two marked cruisers on site.
With files from Caryn Lieberman
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