ONE YEAR AGO: First murder of 2024 pushes fearful Mississauga residents to reach out for help

One year ago, just three days into 2024, gunshots rang out near a busy intersection in Mississauga’s north end during the late Wednesday afternoon rush hour.

Plenty of people were in the area, whether driving in their cars, walking on the sidewalk or inside their homes and apartments making dinner and tending to their kids, when two assailants approached a man on Battleford Road, steps east of Glen Erin Drive, around 5 p.m. on Jan. 3, 2024 and opened fire.

Seconds later, Shawn Murphy, 26, of Mississauga, lay mortally wounded on the ground, his killers having quickly fled the scene on foot. Police and other first responders arrived in relatively short order to find him suffering from multiple gunshot wounds.

Murphy was rushed to hospital, where he was pronounced dead a short time later, his name in the books as the first murder victim of the year in Canada’s seventh-largest city.

The Mississauga man, Peel Regional Police homicide investigators said at the time, is believed to have encountered his killers moments before being shot to death in the densely populated residential neighbourhood of Meadowvale known in recent years for gun violence.

“This is a very crowded area (with pedestrians and motorists),” police, at the time, said of the crime scene, located a couple of blocks west of Erin Mills Parkway.

The murder sent shockwaves — again — through a community that had become fearful in the wake of numerous violent incidents, shootings and other killings the past several years.

Now, residents were afraid once again. And angry.

Only weeks after the Jan. 3, 2024 murder of Shawn Murphy, residents reached out to their city councillor and police for help. They wanted to know how they could protect themselves, their loved ones and take their community back. Make it at least somewhat safer.

Martin Reid, city councillor for the area, and Peel police hosted a community meeting on Feb. 2 to hear from area residents fed up with the violence — gun violence, specifically.

The gathering was held at Meadowvale Community Centre, only steps from the scene of the slaying.

In an email to residents last January, Reid said members of Peel police, Safe City Mississauga and Peel Crime Stoppers would join him at the meeting “to address your concerns of crime prevention and safety awareness.”

A couple of months later, in April, an 18-year-old man and two younger teens, all of Mississauga, were arrested and charged in connection with Murphy’s murder.

Two were charged with second-degree murder while the third, one of the young offenders, was charged with being an accessory to murder after the fact.