[LINK] "Slain Cabbagetown woman came to start a life"
The Toronto Star's Rosie DiManno has a typically emotive, but thorough article describing the life of a recent murder victim. A refugee from Eritrea, Nighisti Semret was walking home from her work as a hotel cleaner to her rented room in Toronto's Cabbagetown neighbourhood about 7 o'clock yesterday morning when she was fatally stabbed by a passerby, apparently at random.
Proud and stoic, a private woman, Nighisti Semret didn’t want people knowing where and how she lived.
Now, sadly, everybody knows where and how she died.
A makeshift flower memorial - forlorn urban ritual for violent loss in modern times - marks the spot where the 55-year-old refugee from Eritrea was brutally slain early Tuesday, a gloomy, wet morning.
The attack was frenzied and seemingly random, Semret’s assailant shadowing her footsteps, striking suddenly from behind, repeatedly plunging the knife. Dropped it, picked it up again, fended off a couple of Good Samaritan wranglers who tried to seize him, and fled.
Semret never saw any of it coming, likely didn’t even hear menace approaching as she walked homeward, umbrella lifted over her head. She’d just finished her overnight shift as a cleaning supervisor at the Delta Chelsea Hotel. No doubt she was tired and anxious to get out of the wet, back to her cramped 12-by-12 bolt-hole at a city-run women’s rooming house on Winchester St., with its shared kitchen and bath down the hall. Home and safety were just 100 metres away.
[. . .]
Yet it was a better life than the one Semret had known in Eritrea, and vastly improved from the homeless, friendless existence of two and a half years ago, when she first arrived in Toronto.
Proud and stoic, a private woman, Nighisti Semret didn’t want people knowing where and how she lived.
Now, sadly, everybody knows where and how she died.
A makeshift flower memorial - forlorn urban ritual for violent loss in modern times - marks the spot where the 55-year-old refugee from Eritrea was brutally slain early Tuesday, a gloomy, wet morning.
The attack was frenzied and seemingly random, Semret’s assailant shadowing her footsteps, striking suddenly from behind, repeatedly plunging the knife. Dropped it, picked it up again, fended off a couple of Good Samaritan wranglers who tried to seize him, and fled.
Semret never saw any of it coming, likely didn’t even hear menace approaching as she walked homeward, umbrella lifted over her head. She’d just finished her overnight shift as a cleaning supervisor at the Delta Chelsea Hotel. No doubt she was tired and anxious to get out of the wet, back to her cramped 12-by-12 bolt-hole at a city-run women’s rooming house on Winchester St., with its shared kitchen and bath down the hall. Home and safety were just 100 metres away.
[. . .]
Yet it was a better life than the one Semret had known in Eritrea, and vastly improved from the homeless, friendless existence of two and a half years ago, when she first arrived in Toronto.