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Just a few metres from the alley where he was shot to death, there is a rapidly weathering shrine to Yonathan Musse: Flowers have been jammed into a chain-link fence, and there are hundreds of plastic ribbons, each hand-lettered with a message of love and loss. "You were the only person that treated me with respect," reads one. "You will stay in my heart forever."

Mr. Musse, known as Jonathan, was not your average drug dealer. After a long night selling crack and ecstasy, he would head back to the apartment he shared with his mother and buckle down to his schoolwork, sometimes going at it until dawn, dreaming of the day when he would became a lawyer. On the weekend, while his fellow dealers slept past noon, Mr. Musse was up before 8 a.m., ready to chauffeur local kids to a basketball game.

More than 500 people showed up for his funeral two weeks ago. There were homeboys who had shared the back of a police cruiser with Mr. Musse, as well as senior citizens whose groceries he carried. The church was filled with tears for a young man whose life defied easy categorization - Mr. Musse had played many roles, including criminal and neighbourhood hero.

He grew up in Alexandra Park, a housing project sandwiched between Kensington Market and the Entertainment District. There, he occupied a unique position in the social hierarchy. He sold drugs to the yuppies who flocked to the club district, then redistributed most of his profit to his community, like a ghetto Robin Hood. At 19, he had emerged as a respected elder statesman among local youth.

"He was always there for us," said Issa Ibrahim, 18. "He stood up for us, and we loved him."

Alexandra Park is no stranger to violence, but Mr. Musse's death has been uniquely painful. "This has ripped a hole in this community," says Adam Vaughan, councillor for Ward 20, Trinity-Spadina. "It's been devastating for a lot of people."

THE PULL OF THE STREET

Had he not been born into a life of poverty, things might have been different for Mr. Musse. He was noted for his quick intelligence, his ability to relate to others and his formidable powers of persuasion. "If he was at the bottom of a well, he could convince you to pull him up, even if you were his enemy," says Olu Quamina, a youth worker at the Alexandra Park Community Centre.

As some have noted, Mr. Musse was a born entrepreneur who had fallen into a trade that happened to be illegal. "For these kids, the drug business is right there," says Colleen Lavallee, a mother who has lived in the community for years. "They don't have that many other opportunities."

Mr. Musse learned first-hand how hard it is for a child raised in a housing project to resist the pull of street life. Jobs were hard to come by, and government cutbacks had reduced the programs available to kids in the area. His mother had come to Canada from Ethiopia to give him more opportunities, but Mr. Musse found himself on one of the lower rungs of this country's economic ladder: Virtually everyone he knew was poor, and his life was played out in the winding courtyards of the housing project.

Alexandra Park has a set of conditions that have created a drug micro-economy: It is populated by poor children, and surrounded by areas full of drug customers. The city's busiest club district is on the area's southern border. To the east is Chinatown. And to the north are Kensington Market and the College Street strip.

On a busy night, dealers like Mr. Musse face a steady stream of buyers who flow into the area around Alexandra Park. One of the busiest trading spots is a dead-end alley next to a car-repair shop on the edge of Chinatown, which offers both concealment and rapid access to Spadina Avenue. The drug trade rises and falls according to a complex set of conditions. When a strike halted work on the reconstruction of the College streetcar line, reducing traffic to a single lane, for example, there was a temporary flurry of drug activity because police cruisers couldn't get through. The demolition of Regent Park also changed the trade's dynamics by introducing new dealers, who came to Alexandra Park and nearby areas when their homes were torn down.

For the kids of Alexandra Park, drug dealing is a seductive, easily available option. Many started out as lookouts for drug dealers at the age of 10 or 12, and advanced to trafficking.

Like many young men in the area, Mr. Musse had been arrested for minor offences in his early teens, and found it almost impossible to get off the police radar afterward. "Once 14 Division knows your name, it's over for you," Ms. Lavallee says. "You're marked."

This spring, Mr. Musse was picked up during a police sweep of suspected gang members, the latest in a series of arrests, many of them for alleged violations of previous bail conditions, such as staying out past curfew or using a cellphone. These charges, known as "fail to comply," figure large in the records of many young people in the area.

"They want a big list, so they can say you're a career criminal," says 21-year-old Josimar Rosales, one of Mr. Musse's closest friends. "You can't win."

Mr. Musse knew that his lifestyle was a losing proposition, and laid plans for his escape. He stayed in school and worked hard to keep up his marks, hoping to get into law school some day. He pushed others to do the same, counselling younger people about personal responsibility. "He always said the same thing," Mr. Rosales recalls. "Stay out of trouble. Stay in school."

Many of Alexandra Park's children come from broken families where single parents struggle to deal with the pressures of raising multiple children on a tight budget. Mr. Musse played the roles of surrogate father and husband, doing what he could to fix the problems he saw around him. When he found that a woman was unable to visit her son, who was doing time in a jail in Hamilton, he began driving her there every other weekend, leaving at 7 a.m. to make sure she got a spot in line.

He gave money to students who couldn't afford the application fee for Ontario universities, and bought shoes for basketball players. If someone didn't have bus fare to get to school or a job interview, Mr. Musse would pay for a cab, or drive them himself in his 2001 Cadillac. When a local got arrested, Mr. Musse was often the first person they called. He would bail them out, help find a lawyer and offer moral support.

More than one local compared Mr. Musse's approach to the community-based support systems set up by the Black Panthers in the 1960s: "That was the kind of approach he took," Ms. Lavallee says. "He looked out for people. He helped and supported them. He wanted them to be proud of where they were from. He told the kids they were just as good as anyone else, and he fought for them."

Mr. Musse had a clear sense of the disadvantages he and his friends faced as residents of a community that has been stigmatized as a hotbed of crime and intergenerational poverty, but he fought to preserve the neighbourhood's order and pride. When an elderly woman had her purse snatched, he chased down the perpetrator and got it back. He rescued another woman from a swarming.

To those who knew him, Mr. Musse was defined by his acts of kindness and dedication, not his illegal profession. "He did what he had to do to make ends meet," says Donna Harrow, executive director of Alexandra Park Community Centre. "He was a good person."

FIREWORKS

Mr. Musse was shot in the morning of May 20, a couple of hours before the sun rose on the Sunday of Victoria Day weekend. Exactly what happened has been the subject of endless speculation, but what is known is that he stepped in to stop a fireworks battle, an unauthorized event that has become a local tradition.

Hundreds of kids raced through the winding courtyards, shooting Roman candles at each other like mortar rounds. The practice had resulted in stern warnings from the security firm that patrols Alexandra Park, and there had been a series of accidents - a few years ago, a boy lost part of his arm, and in 2006, a house on Napanee Court burned down when a Roman candle shot through a window, nearly killing a mother and her three children.

Late Sunday evening, Mr. Musse was out in the streets of Alexandra Park, ordering the kids to take the fireworks to a nearby park and stop shooting them at each other. "He told them it was foolish," a friend says. "They were going to get someone hurt."

Some believe this intervention may have led to his killing. There had been a simmering rivalry between an Alexandra Park gang known as the Project Originalz and another gang based in Regent Park. Those tensions may have flared when someone involved in the fireworks battle reported back to an associate, triggering a fatal mechanism of revenge.

Others advance a different theory, chalking up Mr. Musse's death to the drug trade, with its countless internecine disputes and late-night turf wars. "Maybe someone wanted his territory," one young Alexandra Park resident said this week. "Maybe someone thought he ripped them off. We're never going to know."

Mr. Musse was found in a short alley beside the Russian Ukrainian Church of Evangelical Christians on Carr Street, less than 100 metres from the building where he lived with his mother. Brass bullet casings littered the ground, and there were bullet holes in cars parked along the street. A gun was found on the ground near Mr. Musse. (Police don't know if it was his.) Mr. Musse had been shot in the head, and died four days later, in the intensive care unit of St. Michael's Hospital.

Mr. Musse's was one of three early-morning shootings that took place less than 600 metres apart in a period of 21 days. On May 13, a 24-year-old man was shot and seriously injured at College and Augusta at 3 a.m. Mr. Musse was gunned down seven days later. On June 3, a 21-year-old man was shot in Trinity-Bellwoods Park, but survived.

Investigators at 14 Division and the homicide squad have received little assistance in solving these crimes: The two surviving victims have not co-operated in the investigation. The brand of violence that claimed Mr. Musse is well known to police, who find themselves dealing with a rising number of armed disputes. Many are linked to turf wars between rival gangs or to battles over drug territories.

Although many go unsolved because of the silence of witnesses and survivors, critics also suggest that there is a lack of urgency on the part of police. "To them, it's like a self-cleaning oven," said a former Regent Park drug dealer. "Some homeboy with a gun gets himself capped, it's one less problem for them."

'WE HAVE TO FIX IT'

Councillor Vaughan sees Mr. Musse's death as part of a much larger problem. Social housing projects like Alexandra Park, he believes, help entrench poverty and create social division. He's part of a group pushing for a redevelopment that would alter both the architecture and the culture of Alexandra Park.

"This is a flawed design," he says. "We have to fix it."

Unlike Regent Park, which is being levelled and replaced with a completely different community at a cost estimated at $1-billion, proponents believe Alexandra Park can be repaired with a series of modest yet strategic alterations. They want to knock down two or three buildings to create cross streets that would run through the community, mix in stores, add market-rent housing units, and create a vibrant commercial strip on Dundas Street facing Kensington Market.

Mr. Vaughan thinks the redevelopment would galvanize the area by adding social and economic diversity. "There's tremendous human capital here," he says. "We need to tap into that instead of shutting it down."

He sees Mr. Musse as an unlikely agent of change who used his own energies to take on the problems in his community. "What he showed was that you have a responsibility to your neighbour, and that those who have are responsible for giving."

This week, Mr. Musse's mother, Almaz Raegessa, began cleaning out her son's small bedroom. "He was a wonderful boy," she said. "He showed respect. He was smart. He worked hard."

Ms. Raegessa wore a traditional Ethiopian mourning shawl. On the table was a picture of Mr. Musse at the age

of 14, dressed in a white suit for his junior high graduation ceremony. Ms. Raegessa said she had no idea her son had been a drug dealer. "I never saw that. I knew he had

some trouble, but I saw a good son."

Ironically, Ms. Raegessa and Mr. Musse were scheduled to move out of Alexandra Park just two days after he was shot. Ms. Raegessa, who is employed as a home-care worker, had rented an $800-per-month apartment at St. Clair and Vaughan, hoping it would provide a better environment for her son.

"I love Alexandra Park," Ms. Raegessa said. "But I know a lot of bad things happen to the kids here."

She said she was moved by the number of people who came to her son's funeral, and the stories many of them told about his acts of generosity and kindness. "I didn't know how much he touched other people's lives," she said. "He was a great son. That's how I will remember him until the day I die."

RAISING THE ROOF

While plans to revitalize Alexandra Park are in the works, an event tomorrow will bring together local musicians - and fathers - to raise money for the neighbourhood community centre. "It is the beginning of the discussion of revitalization in the community," says Donna Harrow of the Alexandra Park Community Centre.

A concert will feature local musicians DJ Serious, the Carps and spoken-word artist Boonaa Mohammed. Following the theme "When Men Cook," neighbourhood dads will be cooking West Indian, Mexican, Thai, Chinese and Polish dishes in tents pegged around the park.

Co-presented by ManifesTO, a new festival of Toronto urban music that launches this fall, the afternoon event will help fund the community centre's broad programming, which ranges from a homework club and a youth basketball program to ballroom dance. "We want to see the park revive," says Che Kothari, 23, a founder of ManifesTO.

Producer DJ Serious, who grew up in the neighbourhood, connects the park to his childhood. "I used to cut through the park in the summer and ice skate on the rink during the winter - though I was too artistic to take part in hockey. I was one of the leisurely skaters," he says. "I just can't imagine Alexandra Park or the community centre not being there."

Nadja Sayej

Tomorrow from 1 to 7 p.m. at Alexandra Park Community Centre, 105 Grange Court. Free.

THREE SPRING NIGHTS, THREE SHOOTINGS

A pattern of violence? Shortly before and after Jonathan Musse's death, there were two other shootings within blocks of Alexandra Park. Police won't comment on a link to the other shootings; the victims in both cases have been described by police as uncooperative.1. May 13, 2:58 a.m.

At College and Augusta, a male of unknown age is injured in a shooting.

2. May 20, 2:15 a.m.

Jonathan Musse, 19, is fatally shot in an alley. (see detailed map below).

3. June 3, 4:10 a.m.

In Trinity-Bellwoods Park, a 21-year-old male is shot and injured.

Mr. Musse was shot in the alley beside a church on Carr St.

Friends/family have placed ribbons in the fence in the park across the street.

Mr. Musse lived in an apartment at 73 Augusta.

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