By Savannah Ridley
After a long October night of hauling peanut packets and chilled beer cans up and down the countless flights of stairs at the Rogers Centre, Adam Silver finally made it home. Downtrodden from the physical exhaustion of his shift and the disappointment of another Blue Jays loss, Silver was relieved to crawl into bed. His slumber was cut short by frantic banging at his back door echoing through the stagnant 6 a.m. air—kickstarting his central nervous system. Before Silver could rub the sleep from his eyes, he says he heard the door open and a foreign voice screech, “Please help me! Call the cops! Lock your doors! Cover your windows!” As Silver’s eyes focused, he saw a shirtless man drenched in oxygenated blood with a roughly ten-centimetre congealed gash across his ear and bruises across his body.
“He looked like he’d been through a tornado,” Silver recalled.
Huddled in the fetal position, the man apologized for scaring Silver between pleas to ensure every entrance and sightline was secured. Gasping for air, the man told Silver that five men kidnapped him and took him to a crack house to brutalize him as consequence of a drug debt. He said the torture lasted two hours before he made his escape through the home’s second-story window. After hitting the ground, he said that to evade his captors, he bounded through surrounding neighbours’ yards darted across Dufferin Street, and, in a snap decision, looked for safety in someone’s home—Silver’s home.
After EMTs and Toronto Police arrived to hurry the man towards an E.R., the man’s story whirled in Silver’s mind. Silver had only moved to the area two years prior to the 2022 incident, but he recalled some neighbourhood rumblings about a problematic house on Lappin Avenue. He wondered if this was the same house that the man escaped from. Silver took to Facebook to log every detail of the incident, to which bewildered friends mentioned that there were multiple police officers outside a home half a block away at 92 Lappin.
Longtime residents of the Wallace-Emerson neighbourhood know the home very well. For the last two decades, Lappin locals have known the house to be the site of garbage piles taller than chain link fences, inebriated unstable addicts, stolen neighbourhood items, and the odd shooting. But what’s most bizarre about this house is how judicially impenetrable it is.
The house at 92 Lappin is a rental property that problematic tenants have occupied since the late 1990s. Deep-rooted resident Bill Moretti remembers the years predating their arrival quite fondly. “It was quieter. You didn’t have people screaming as if they were in some form of mental distress or jonesing for their next hit. You didn’t have women walking down the street taking off their clothes.”
Despite the nearly constant disruption, the home‘s occupants have withstood seven municipal councillors and seven Toronto Police chiefs. The only public action that has arisen from the municipal government was a City Council motion brought forth by former councillors Ana Bailão and Gary Crawford in 2019. Motion MM43.45 aimed to retroactively charge the owner of 92 Lappin for the costs accrued by city services frequently responding to by-law violations at the home. According to the City of Toronto investigation activity map, 61 by-law violation investigation requests have been made against 92 Lappin in just the last two years.
T• Community reached out to Bailão and Crawford, hoping to learn the motion’s fate. Crawford said in an email to ask Bailão, and Bailão’s email is locked up like Fort Knox, blocking interview requests from its servers. In a further attempt to uncover the motion’s outcome, T• Community contacted the current councillors who took over for Bailão and Crawford, Alejandra Bravo and Parthi Kandavel, for comment. Kandavel’s office did not respond, and Bravo’s office refused the request in an email, stating “privacy and confidentiality concerns.” It is unclear whether motion MM43.45 passed and no one wants to talk about it.
Wallace-Emerson residents are very familiar with feeling disregarded. Moretti said that residents are only granted community meetings with councillors and police when they make a big enough stink about 92 Lappin that can’t be ignored. Silver noted that when these meetings are organized, one or two representatives from Bravo’s office will show up along with constables from Division 11 and social workers involved with various mental health services. But even then, these meetings aren’t very fruitful.
Ricardo Nunes, who moved to Lappin with his family as a teenager, stopped attending these community meetings as he felt they were just a waste of time. “Everybody was just saying things that we already know […] It’s always the same thing. ‘We’re gonna do more, we’re gonna do more,’ but they don’t really do more,” Nunes said, shaking his head housing a defeated expression.
Pam Shere, Lappin resident of three years, has first-hand experience with government inaction. Shere moved to the area in early 2021, and started noticing needles in the alleyway beside her apartment. Not long afterwards, people started hanging around her home throughout the wee hours of the night. Shere assumed they were customers of 92 Lappin since they would often leave a mess of discarded drug paraphernalia in the morning. Although her sleep schedule was thrown completely off kilter, Shere felt they were manageable dilemmas—until her car got broken into… twice. The first time, Shere admits that she had left her car unlocked. No damage was done to her vehicle, but a new $25 pair of pants, a used construction sweater, and an iPhone charging cord were stolen. It was a distressing experience to have her property violated, but Shere didn’t feel like she had suffered any huge losses. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the second break-in.
Shere logged the incident in a community Facebook group, writing that someone shattered her rear driver’s side window to steal a high-visibility construction vest and five dollars in pocket change. In a Zoom interview, Shere said that she immediately called Toronto Police, to which she was told that the crime committed against her vehicle was “not worth their time” and to file an insurance claim. “That’s what really set me off. His inability to apologize or feel any empathy,” she sighed. Shere explained that her car insurance policy’s deductible is greater than the repair costs, leaving a $500 hole in her bank account and no justice served.
T• Community has been trying to schedule an interview with a Toronto Police representative to gain insight into neighbourhood allegations against 92 Lappin. For an entire month, TPS has circumvented our inquiries by not answering phone calls, failing to follow up with interview requests, and reassigning the media relations officer designated to us to another department without notice. If a news publication cannot get any answers from the police, it’s no wonder the residents of Lappin Avenue are frustrated with their public servants. “Is the problem that we don’t make enough tax bracket for someone to care?,” Shere declaimed. “Growing up—the squeaky wheel got the grease. Can we have some grease? How loud do we need to squeak?”