Jeffrey Reodica vigil marks 10 years since fatal police shooting
Posted May 21, 2014 5:53 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Friends and family gathered on Wednesday evening for a candlelight vigil to mark 10 years since the fatal police shooting of 17-year-old Jeffrey Reodica.
The teen was shot by Det. Const. Dan Belanger three times in the back on May 21, 2004, during a brawl between two groups of teens. He died three days later in hospital.
Belanger claimed Jeffrey was wielding a knife, but conflicting eyewitness accounts maintained he was unarmed and didn’t pose a serious threat to the officers.
The Special Investigations Unit later cleared Belanger by calling the shooting justifiable.
A coroner’s inquest was also conducted to look into conflicting testimony about whether Belanger and his partner Det. Const. Allen Love properly identified themselves to Reodica and whether a less lethal means of force, like a baton, could have been used.
Family and friends call the case a blatant injustice and say it has been a constant struggle over the last decade to come to terms with what happened.
“It feels like it’s hopeless… There’s no hope in getting justice for him,” Jeffrey’s brother Joel Roedica told CityNews. “There’s pretty much not a day that goes by that you don’t think about Jeffrey and what he could be doing today if he was alive.”
Roedica said people don’t have to look far to see that police violence is still a problem, citing Sammy Yatim who died from multiple police gunshots during a confrontation on an empty TTC streetcar last summer.
He says unlike the Yatim case, cellphone cameras and YouTube weren’t around 10 years ago to help with his family’s battle for justice.
“If Toronto Police Services can’t hold their own people accountable, we’ll have to take it into our own hands,” Roedica said “We’ll have to bring our cellphone cameras out every time we see police interact with civilians and people and young people and children in a wrong manner.”
“It would have been nice to have that in 2004. It would have been a whole different story I think,” he said.
Friends and family gathered at Nathan Phillips Square at 7 p.m. to celebrate Jeffrey’s life.
