Kevin Ebanks, 27, and his kid brother, Jermaine, 18, spent their last panicked moments alive in the blood-soaked front seat of a black Honda, trying to flee a gunman.
The Scarborough gang members had been shot in the back as they ran from an Eglinton Avenue nightclub to their car. The pair crashed into two other cars before their Honda and their lives came to a halt, a half-kilometre from the dance hall.
The killings on that bloody Sunday -- two other young men were shot dead in unrelated homicides within the hour on Oct. 27, almost exactly a year ago -- still shocked a city that had become increasingly accustomed to gun violence.
Much was made of Kevin's and Jermaine's links to the Versace Crew, a street gang with a reputation for designer outfits and casual brutality. Within days, the brothers' killer would be shot in the face, in front of children, in a strip-mall parking lot in broad daylight, by killers who have never been identified.
And there the story of the Ebanks brothers seemed to end -- for a time. But a common thread of violence connects their lives with those of three other siblings, all of whom have ended up in jail or in the grave in the past 12 months.
In August, Christopher Ebanks was riddled with bullets in a gangland slaying in the family's native Jamaica, just days after his 26th birthday. A half-brother, 30-year-old Kirk Heslop, is in a Toronto jail, facing deportation after being found with a stolen handgun. He argues that he, too, will be killed by gangsters if he is returned to Jamaica. Yet another brother, 24-year-old Nicholas Ebanks, was arrested in Toronto last month on murder-conspiracy charges.
Observers say the successive shootings and retaliations involving the Versace Crew demonstrate the interplay of guns, gangs and drugs on Toronto streets -- and the emergence of a parallel justice system in which gangsters act as judge, jury and executioner. "The value of human life has disintegrated to zero," says Mark Mendelson, a homicide detective who investigated the killings of Kevin and Jermaine.
Another source familiar with the violence puts it more starkly. "It's an incestuous little world of people . . . who basically have no respect for anything," a Toronto lawyer says. The Ebanks brothers, he says, are "street-life gangsters who liked robbing people, guns, drugs, money, girls. And they thought they were untouchable."
The story of the brothers -- "excellent boys," according to their father -- starts a decade ago. Their parents, Sonia and Dennis Ebanks, immigrated to Canada from Jamaica with their four sons, sponsored by one of the boys' uncles, and settled in a Scarborough high-rise. In time, Dennis would find work at a landscaping company. The boys took a different approach to seeking the finer things in life.
They became known as key players in the Versace Crew, a group said to fund its members' wardrobes by robbing crack dealers, among other victims. "They made a lot of enemies, that's for sure. It's the price of doing business, right?" one Scarborough police officer says. He says the brothers were so tight-knit and menacing that even police were wary. "If you were talking to one of them, you were looking over your shoulder waiting for another one."Christopher Ebanks, 27, deceased
Before he was shot dead this summer in Kingston, Jamaica, Christopher spent time in Ontario's Kingston Penitentiary, completing a six-year sentence for aggravated assault. It was the latest in a long string of offences that began shortly after his arrival in Canada. According to parole records, in 1993 he was accused of a near-fatal knife attack and another attack in a crack house. That same year, he admitted in court to threatening his father's life, parole records say.
No model inmate in Kingston, he was denied parole because officials feared he might kill someone if he was released. While a prisoner, he stabbed two people in the chest and lit fires in his cell. But his most defiant moment came when he flew a kite, with a note appended to it, in the penitentiary yard.
"Pass the word on my brothers. It's war on the police here at K.P. Fuck them all," the note said, according to Christopher's deportation file. "Let's rock and roll all the way out of here. All my brothers -- start tonight." He exhorted prisoners to save up fluids -- milk, soup and bodily -- and chuck the cocktails at prison guards.
Christopher was released last winter. But he was immediately rearrested and declared a danger to Canada. As deportation proceedings began, he asked for another chance. "Nobody's perfect. Things happen. You know what I'm saying? . . . They say a man can change," he said at his Toronto hearing, attended by his parents, uncle, grandmother and aunt. Admitting that he had been in and out of jail since he was 18, he argued he could yet redeem himself. "I'm suggesting that I can be a good citizen like any other citizen," he said, denying that he was ever a drug-dealing gang member.
Officials disagreed. In February, he was deported back to Jamaica, where thousands of criminal deportees from Canada, the United States and Britain are regarded as a major contributor to that country's crime problems.
According to a newspaper in Jamaica, Christopher soon gained a reputation as an intimidating thug nicknamed GP, who extorted money from businesses . On Aug. 22, two men fired six nine-millimetre bullets into his jaw, hands and back. Christopher became the 598th homicide victim in Jamaica in 2003. Jamaican police will say only that his death was gang-related and that the killers remain at large.
The island nation has a population of 2.6 million. By contrast, Toronto -- population 2.5 million -- sees an average of 60 homicides during any given calendar year.
Nicholas Ebanks, 24, charged with murder conspiracy
Brother Nicholas, who has a mouth full of gold teeth, visited Christopher in Jamaica after he was deported. He aslo returned to Jamaica for the funeral. A few weeks after returning to Toronto, he was charged with conspiracy to commit murder.
Toronto detectives allege Nicholas is the man behind a June non-fatal shooting in Toronto that took place dangerously close to children leaving a nearby school. They further describe the 24-year-old as the leader of the Versace Crew -- a position he is said to have inherited "through attrition."
Nicholas is awaiting trial for his alleged role in the June shooting. But police already describe his arrest and others as a "minor victory" in their war on street gangs. An associate arrested on the same day as Nicholas stands charged with a February murder of a father of five. The victim and alleged killer, who both had links to the Versace Crew, had an apparent falling out over the ownership of a handgun.
Police say the street gang has a surprisingly sophisticated hierarchy involving presidents, lieutenants and soldiers. Other sources say recent events have not weakened the gang's core, and that Nicholas is not the gang's main leader.
Staff Inspector Gary Ellis, head of the city's homicide squad, told a press conference this month that Toronto police will likely make more arrests involving the group.
Kirk Heslop, 30,
facing deportation
In March, convictions for assault, weapons and firearms offences landed Mr. Heslop in a Toronto jail. Officials are trying to deport him for his criminal activity, but Mr. Heslop argues that his blood ties to the other Ebanks brothers would amount to a death sentence.
"You know, if I get deported, I'm going to the same neighbourhood and they said they're going after me," he told officials at a September hearing, fearing that Christopher's killers might continue their score-settling with him.
Immigration officials are weighing this argument, but have made it clear that Mr. Heslop is no sympathetic figure. According to an arrest record referred to at his deportation hearing, it was his mother, Sonia, who made an assault complaint against him last November. "He had threatened to lay this person out on the floor and put bullets in her head," an immigration official said at the hearing.
According to the arrest record, Mr. Heslop was also discovered to be in possession of a loaded .40-calibre Sig Sauer handgun. The adjudicator further faults him for his lifestyle. "In the year in which you were at large in Canada, not only did you commit a series of criminal offences, you have managed to have relationships and make pregnant two women," he told Mr. Heslop at the hearing, condemning him for not having a job or acting as a father.
Transcripts show that the hearing bogged down into confusion when officials tried to establish how Mr. Heslop, a later arrival to Canada than his brothers, got into the country.
"My brother's passport I used," he said.
"Your brother's?" asked the adjudicator.
"Then he died."
"The one who was here and got deported?"
"No, not that one."
"Another one?"
"Yeah."
Kevin Ebanks, 27, and Jermaine Ebanks, 18, both deceased
There is a prologue to last year's double homicide. Police say Jermaine quarrelled over drugs with a man known as Heavy D at a Scarborough mall a few days before tensions boiled over outside the dance club. Heavy D -- born O'Neil Ricardo Greenland -- was an illegal immigrant from Jamaica who cultivated his own reputation for violence.
As tensions mounted, Jermaine dialled for backup. He called big brother Kevin -- an intimidating presence who had amassed adult criminal charges involving firearms, theft and threatening bodily harm. He was also a father of three small children.
The dispute between the brothers and Heavy D was settled in the parking lot. Security video shows the club crowd pouring outside to watch as Heavy D grabbed a nine-millimetre handgun from his car and shot at Kevin and Jermaine. "They were excellent boys, excellent boys," Dennis Ebanks, the father, told a Toronto Sun reporter the next day. "I just want the police to catch them [the killers]and bring them to justice," he said. "I want this to be the last family they hurt."
But the violence continued. Three men, after leaving the funeral home where the bodies of Kevin and Jermaine Ebanks lay, were wounded by bullets as their car was shot at by unknown attackers on Highway 401. Then, on Nov. 9, Heavy D ended up on the losing end of a fatal Scarborough shootout with three men who have never been identified.
Kevin and Jermaine are buried in Scarborough. A few weeks ago, a humble marker that reads, "Together forever," was laid at their gravesite.
It is a modest monument, engraved with a scene of jack pines and a lake under moonlight. The tranquil setting bears faint resemblance to the lavish and violent world in which the Ebanks brothers chose to live and die.
Colin Freeze