As the students of Forest Hill Collegiate spilled out into the bright sunshine Friday afternoon and headed home for the weekend, all the talk was about one of their own, missing for more than four days. The mood was not good.
“Everybody's like ‘Wow, this used to be such a safe area, what's going on here?'” said Lauren Lubchansky, a Grade 11 student who normally walks home but on this day was awaiting a ride from her older sister.
“How did this happen?”
Many others were asking the same question.
Amid a mounting sense of alarm, police with dogs and horses had been fanning out across north Toronto since early morning, searching parkland, scouring dump sites and appealing for whatever information they could find.
The hunt was for 17-year-old Mariam Makhniashvili, an immigrant and newcomer to Toronto who vanished from outside the doors of FHC Monday morning and has not been seen or heard from since.
As an indication of how seriously police view the case, early in the day the search was raised to a Level 3 – the maximum level, usually deployed in searches for small children.
Homeowners living within a three-kilometre radius of the school were urged to check their properties for any signs of Mariam.
And while they did not say so publicly, the working theory of the investigators is that Mariam has encountered foul play.
Staff Inspector Larry Sinclair of 53 Division told reporters the investigation was raised to a Level 3 because Mariam's disappearance is so out of character, and because she is unfamiliar with the city.
“She's been in Toronto for less than 90 days and to the best of our knowledge she has no friends, and her only relatives in North America are her parents and her brother,” he said.
Every avenue that might account for the girl's disappearance is now being explored, lead investigator Detective Steve McIlwain said.
“We're looking at all scenarios, nothing has been eliminated from the investigative pool.”
Mariam's parents said there had been no family altercation that might have prompted their daughter to run away from home, and police concurred.
“There's nothing to lead me to believe that there's anything strained with her relationship with her parents,” Det. McIlwain said.
Originally from the republic of Georgia, part of the former Soviet Union until it gained independence, Mariam was last seen Monday morning by her younger brother George as the pair arrived together at FHC, a short walk from the family's apartment.
The two teens split up to go into the building through different doors.
Her brother never saw her again, and she didn't attend class that day. She was not carrying a cellphone and the school has no closed-circuit video surveillance system.
George has remained at school this week and one of his Grade 10 classmates is Marnee Herberman, who was with him in math class yesterday when it was announced that the 900-plus-student school will be searched exhaustively over the weekend.
“It was a little awkward,” she said.
Mariam's parents – both teachers – moved to Toronto in May after living and working in Los Angeles for several years.
The family's home is a seventh-floor apartment in a well-kept, grey-and-white 10-storey rental building on Shallmar Boulevard, west of Bathurst Street.
Raised by their grandparents in Georgia, Mariam and George were reunited with their parents in June and had just begun their first school year at FHC, near Bathurst Street and Eglinton Avenue, a neighbourhood home to a sizable Russian-immigrant community.
Asked if the long-term Russian-Georgian animosity, which erupted into war last year, could have any possible bearing on events, Staff Insp. Sinclair replied, “That's something we're looking at.”
Toronto police have been in touch with Mariam's relatives in Georgia, Det. McIlwain said.
Affluent and clean, the neighbourhood has rarely experienced anything like this, said Grade 11 student Zoe Wisenberg
