It was a record-breaking year for violence, when the term “femicide” entered the police lexicon.
A brutal family slaying. A Christmas day homicide. A suspect still on the lam 11 months after shooting a man dead in a Little Italy apartment block.
These are just a few headline-grabbing acts of violence that illustrate a grim year of violence in the nation’s capital.
Data from Ottawa police shows 25 homicides occurred in 2024, compared to just 14 the year prior.
Shootings, however, were down by 25 per cent on the year, with 52 on the books as of mid-December, compared to a total of 72 shootings in 2023.
While 2024 may be a record-breaking year, violent crime in Ottawa has been steadily increasing over the years, according to an Algonquin College study homicides from 2010-2020.
The first
Jama Roble, 33, was the city’s first homicide victim of 2024.
He was shot midday on Jan. 29 in the 100 block of Champagne Avenue, succumbing to his injuries days later.
Matthew Robertson, a second-year university student who lives at Envie Little Italy, the highrise building at 105 Champagne Ave. S, told this newspaper he heard “bangs” from his room on the 25th floor. An email from building management said the victim was a visitor of a tenant.
Gibriil Bakal, a 29-year-old man from Edmonton, is facing a first-degree murder charge for Roble’s shooting death. He remains at large.
Bakal is among Canada’s top 25 most-wanted criminals, according to a Dec. 4 update of the nation-wide list.
He is eighth on the list, which is used to encourage public assistance in tracking high-priority suspects. The “be on lookout” or BOLO program, uses social media and targeted campaigns to amplify police wanted notices.
Evening Update
A tragic day
While it’s impossible to quantify the grief and suffering families and communities feel after a violent crime, one in particular shook the city to its core.
The national capital region was devastated by the brutal March 6 slaying of six people, including a mother and her four children, in what was called a senseless act of violence, and one of the worst mass killings in Ottawa’s history.
The mass killing occurred late in the evening of March 6, in a townhouse the family, originally from Sri Lanka, was renting.
The victims:
- Darshani Dilanthika Ekanayake, 35-year-old wife and mother;
- Inuka, seven-year-old son;
- Ashwini, four-year-old daughter;
- Ranaya, three-year-old daughter;
- Kelly, two-month-old daughter;
- Gamini Amarakoon, 40-year-old family friend.
Ekanayake’s husband, Dhanushka Wickramasinghe, was the lone survivor of the attack.
The mass killing occurred late in the evening of March 6, in a townhouse the family, originally from Sri Lanka, was renting.
Febrio De Zoysa, 19, faces six counts of first-degree murder and one count of attempted murder. He had been living with the victims in a rented townhouse on Berrigan Drive at the time of the killings.
Wickramasinghe came home around 10:30 p.m. and found De-Zoysa with a knife, according to Bhanthe Sumanarathana, a monk and family friend. Wickramasinghe discovered the bodies of his family, and locked himself in a room, calling 911. De Zoysa was arrested shortly thereafter.
Experts say the case could take years to work its way through the legal system. De Zoysa remains incarcerated at Ottawa’s Innes Road jail. None of the charges against him have been proven in court.
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Murder by another name
For the first time, Ottawa police used “femicide” to distinguish a homicide that is motivated by misogyny.
In total, two women were killed in alleged femicides in 2024.
On Aug. 25, A 47-year-old woman was found dead in her home, and a 55-year-old man was charged with second-degree murder, in what police described as a “femicide.”
Police were called to a home on Lady Slipper Way, west of Stittsville, at about 6:40 p.m. on a summer Sunday evening to investigate the death of Jennifer Zabarylo, 47. Michael Zabarylo was charged with second-degree murder.
“In the context of police investigations, we consider this death to be a femicide as it occurred in the context of intimate partner violence, which is one of the many forms of misogynist killings,” police said in a statement. The police force defines femicide as “the killing of women and girls because of their gender,” often driven by stereotyped gender roles, discrimination towards women or unequal power relations between women and men.
The Canadian Femicide Observatory for Justice and Accountability defines femicide as “the killing of all women and girls primarily by, but not exclusively, men.”
Two months later, a Montreal man was charged with first-degree murder after a brazen stabbing death of a young mother, who was attacked while supervising two of her children in a south Ottawa park.
Police say the accused, Fsha Tekhle, 36, had a domestic relationship with a relative of the victim, Brkti Berhe, a 36-year-old mother of four.
In an interview, police chief Eric Stubbs said femicide is an epidemic.
“We, along with our community partners, have to work as hard as we can to try to eliminate it or, realistically, decrease the rates of violence against women,” he said. “When gender-based violence is part of an incident that we’re investigating we’re very focused on that. It’s something that we put a lot of resources into, to make sure that we solve that file and find out what occurred so we can address it.”
Searching for solutions
Dr. Shannon Turner is the national co-chair for Prevention of Violence Canada, and executive director of the Public Health Association of B.C.
She says the solutions to violence are “in our streets and in our households,” and require police forces, municipalities, school districts and non-profits to create a collaborative solution.
While the solution to violence has to include more than just policing, she said, “there is a dynamic we need to be mindful of, which pits policing against community services.”
Across Canada, police service budgets have increased, but cities haven’t “put counterweights on the scale to ensure the level of prevention,” she said in a recent interview.
“Citizens are being victimized, women and children in particular are being victimized, and we have to create a better safety net in Canada. At every level, across the life course, we can intervene with settings-based approaches that promote positive social norms, and create opportunities for people to achieve our potential.”
That includes supporting low-stress home environments and reducing bullying and other violent incidents in schools, she said, teaching children self-regulation and other skills to ensure they’ll get a solid education and have a lower chance of participating in violence or joining gangs.
“Once people are victims of violence, or experience violence, we have another series of interventions to deploy to ensure it doesn’t happen again,” she said, adding that prevention efforts aren’t just legislative, but also social, like creating stress-free community environments.
“It would be remiss of me not to address issues of income, and the challenges people are experiencing with poverty in this country, with the rising inflationary cost of housing and food,” Turner said. “These things can lead to increased criminal activity.
“Feeding people makes a difference.”
