Danforth shooter ‘was afraid he was going to hurt people’
By
WENDY GILLISCrime Reporter
Wed., July 25, 2018
As a student at Victoria Park Collegiate Institute,
Faisal Hussain was a “very disturbed” young man who spoke “a lot about the pain he was in and the voices that he heard,” says the former head of special education at the high school.
Enrolled in Focus on Success, a separate program for at-risk students, the skinny teen frequently voiced a fear he might hurt someone, and once repeatedly cut into his face with a pencil sharpener blade, prompting a call to police, says educator Jenessa Dworet.
“He was really scared of himself,” said Dworet. “He was afraid he was going to hurt people. He was very obsessed with guns.”
Hussain, 29, walked down a stretch of Danforth Ave. just after 10 p.m. Sunday night and opened fire, killing 10-year-old
Julianna Kozis, 18-year-old Reese Fallon and injuring more than a dozen others. He died of a fatal gunshot wound after exchanging gunfire with two officers; authorities have not revealed the circumstances of his death, but police sources have said he shot himself.
Dworet, who lives off the Danforth, heard the killer’s name but didn’t realize it was her former student until she saw Hussain’s photograph. She recognized the face of a young man who, nearly a decade ago, she would take on walks around the school neighbourhood in an effort to calm him down.
“It was chilling, because part of me was thinking: ‘What if he had done something like this while I worked with him?’ And part of me was thinking: ‘How could he have gone nine years without getting more support?’
“And that just breaks my heart, because I know he could have been a better person if he had had more support, or he at least could have been less of a threat to society,” she said.
