Police north of Toronto are working to determine the motive in what they’ve called a horrendous mass shooting at a condo that left five people dead, plus the suspected gunman.
York Regional Police say Francesco Villi’s victims at the high-rise building in Vaughan, Ont., on Sunday night included three members of the building’s condo board.
Court documents indicate the 73-year-old had a lengthy history of threatening members of the board and believed they had a conspiracy to “systematically murder” him.
Police say a sixth shooting victim — the wife of a board member — remained in hospital with serious injuries.
The force also says Villi shot the victims in three different units in the building before an officer shot and killed him.
Now, if this had happened in the United States, recent documentation would have recorded the Vaughan killings as the 602nd mass murder of the year (as of November 20).
If stats tell us anything there will have been at least 26 more mass murders in the U.S. since Nov. 20 — since they have been averaging 13 incidents a week.
The tally comes from the Gun Violence Archive, an independent data collection organization. The group defines a mass shooting as an incident in which four or more people are shot or killed, excluding the shooter.
Vaughan, therefore, would have qualified.
On May 14, a racist attack at a Buffalo, N.Y., supermarket snatched the lives of 10 people and left three more injured. It was the deadliest mass shooting of the year in the United States for just over a week.
Ten days later, a gunman targeted a Grade 4 class at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas,, killing 21 and injuring 17. It was the deadliest school shooting in America since Sandy Hook.
Mass shootings happen in the U.S. with depressing regularity. The nation has seen at least 26 mass shootings since the start of November, with the latest on Saturday at a LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs where at least five people were killed in the shooting and at least 18 others were injured.
Mass shootings in gun-loving America are a common recurrence, with 2021 ending with 690 mass shootings. The year before saw 611. And 2019 had 417.
The massacres don’t come out of nowhere, says Mark Follman, who has been researching mass shootings since 2012, when a gunman killed 12 people at a movie theatre in Aurora, Colo.
“This is planned violence. There is, in every one of these cases, always a trail of … behavioral warning signs,” he told NPR.
“The general public views mass shooters as people who are totally crazy, insane. It fits with the idea of snapping, as if these people are totally detached from reality.”
That’s not the case, he said. There’s “a very rational thought process” that goes into planning and carrying out mass shootings.
Describing Vaughan as one of the country’s largest small towns, its mayor Steven Del Duca said people tend to know each other and talk freely in the community.
“What would have driven an individual to take matters into their own hands this way, were there breakdowns in the process, were there other issues affecting this particular individual,” Del Duca. “Just lots of issues that will need to be addressed. And I’m pretty sure York Region Police, they know that.”
A mass shooting of this size would barely draw notice in the U.S, but, in gun paranoid Canada, we got tweets of condolences from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Ontario Premier Doug Ford.
In a lengthy video posted to Facebook hours before the killings — but which he says was shot on Dec. 13 – the suspected shooter, now dead, listed the people he blamed for his illness and for his losses in an ongoing court case.
His statements are full of religious fervour and deep-seated paranoia about the people he believes conspired to hurt him and ruin his life.
Villi calls out Solmar, the company that built the Bellaria condo development where he lived, his own lawyer, and various other people who are believed to be condo board members and officers.
In the 16-minute video, he talks about these people being killers, stating, “They are murdering me in my own home for self interest and for money … they have harmed me enough for seven years.”
And he accuses people of bribing and manipulating judges.
“They want me dead. You can take this body but never this soul, this spirit … God will see me through. I am ready to die.”
