Police have arrested two more people in connection with the deadly shooting of a 21-year-old Scarborough man who investigators say may have been targeted solely because of the neighbourhood he lived in.
The shooting took place near Morningside Avenue and Danzig Street on Sept. 24, 2023, as Joshua Bernard-Reis returned home after helping a family member move, police say.
Det. Sgt. Brendan Price said that Reis had just parked his car in his driveway and was approaching his home when four males opened fire at him and another male still in the car from a parkette across the street.
Police say the suspects parked their vehicle, ran across the street into the parkette and shot at the victim and the other individual inside the vehicle.
Reis was struck by gunfire and rushed to hospital with life-threatening injuries but ultimately died two weeks later. The other male managed to escape any physical injury.
All four suspects then fled the area in what is believed to be a stolen vehicle, police said.
Police announced the arrests of two people in connection with the shooting last January but nearly a year went by without any additional breaks in the case.
On Monday, 21-year-old Tyler Brown of Toronto and an 18-year-old man who was underage at the time of incident were also arrested and charged with first-degree murder and attempted murder.
Police say they are not seeking any additional suspects in connection with the shooting.
“Danzig Street has had issues in the past and it seems like there is a high likelihood that this was a situation where it was a message to the street or something like that because there is no reason these two individuals would have been targeted,” Price said during a press conference on Thursday.
“They are not involved in any kind of criminality or gang involvement. These are two hard working individual people, young persons who happened to live on Danzig Street.”
Police have said that the individuals taken into custody so far all have gang affiliations. Reis, however, was not known to police.
“We see these kinds of incidents over the years where a gang might try and send a message to the opposite gang by shooting an individual in their neighbourhood,” Price said.
“This kind of disgusting targeting of innocent people simply because of the neighbourhood they might live in is a terrible circumstance, but we do see that type of thing happening sometimes and it appears that it is a possible explanation for this.”
The two individuals previously charged in the shooting - then 19-year-old Jermaine Goode from Markham and a 16-year-old boy – remain before the courts.