In the international-languages classes held two evenings a week at Georges Vanier Secondary School is both the promise and the peril of Canada's most ethnically diverse city.
Every Monday and Wednesday night, 700 students drawn from across the city of Toronto come to the brown-brick school just south of the Peanut Plaza in North York to take as many as 30 classes in an astonishing variety of languages.
The beauty is that so many young people, from so many different parts of the world, should meet in one place; the danger is that they form a community of strangers, with no particular ties to the school or the area -- "a mixed clientele which may breed some serious dynamics," is how one educator puts it. Two nights ago, there were classes in Cantonese, Japanese, Greek, Farsi, Arabic, Urdu and Finnish.
Konstantin Kocherga, 18, of suburban Richmond Hill, Ont., was taking none of these classes, nor was he a student at Vanier, as the school is called. But he was, at least, in the vicinity when at 9.30 p.m. classes ended and students poured out the building doors.
Ten minutes later, Toronto police got a call, and when they arrived, young Mr. Kocherga was discovered with -- in the jargon of paramedics -- "vital signs absent" and lying on the pavement just outside the front entrance.
He had been stabbed and suffered blunt-force trauma, and this morning an autopsy will determine precisely what killed him.
But what police know is that Mr. Kocherga, the son of immigrant parents from the former Soviet Union who got the terrible news of their child's death through an interpreter, was caught in a massive brawl -- involving baseball bats, chains, edged weapons and perhaps as many as 30 young combatants -- that erupted in the courtyard that separates Vanier from Woodbine Junior High School.
At least two other young people -- one a Vanier student, the other a Humber College student -- were injured in the melee.
It is far too soon, lead homicide- squad investigator Detective Ray Zarb said yesterday, to know whether this was a battle between rival groups, and certainly, another police source told The Globe and Mail, it was not a turf fight between hard-core criminal gangs.
But there are whispers that the clash, apparently born in some festering dispute, was between groups of Iranians and Russians.
Det. Zarb said early indicators are that "there were 10 to 12 on one side, with a larger contingent on the other that came to battle." And Toronto Police Chief Julian Fantino, who yesterday held a press conference to denounce the rising plague of youth violence in the city, told reporters that though "not all the answers are in, my fear is that it has the appearance" of a brawl between, if not gangs, then groups of young people.
Part of the difficulty, The Globe has learned, is the way that night school has changed over the years.
Where once evening classes were attended in the main by adults who worked by day and sought to upgrade their education at night -- and were thus so motivated and serious that teachers regarded them as the easiest students to handle -- night school in the modern world is a very different creature. Now, most of the students are young. Many attemd classes only part time or picking up missing credits.
Some are those who, because of discipline problems, have worn out their welcome in regular day school.
The result, sources said, is an oft-intimidating environment of strangers with no vested interest in Vanier itself and often less in learning.
Already at Vanier, at night school, the doors are locked after the break as a security precaution. But now, Dominic DiFelice, executive superintendent with the Toronto District School Board, said yesterday, officials are thinking they may have to issue students with identity badges, such as those that day-time students must wear.
The school sits in a municipal ward where residents speak 17 different languages, and where the new Russian immigrants join a community where Iranians, Armenians, Arabs and Chinese are well established.
Aris Babikian, who is running for the council seat in the Nov. 10 municipal election and who speaks five languages, said yesterday that it is not his experience that new immigrants "are bringing their homeland issues here." He believes that the brawl is more likely the result of "youth-related issues" in an area where many parents are so busy keeping body and soul together that their young people are too often left unsupervised.
Mr. Babikian's campaign manager, Jason Sellin, was driving past the school shortly before the fatal brawl erupted. The area around the school was hopping, Mr. Sellin said yesterday, with as many as 30 cars parked along Don Mills Road, four-way lights flashing, and a great group of young people gathered in the courtyard between the two buildings.
The crowd was big enough to catch his attention, he said, but all looked so peaceable. "There were no signs of chaos or violence," Mr. Sellin said. "It looked like maybe parents were picking up kids."
Most of the young people were wearing hats or hoodies, he said, but even so, he could see that the faces were of the usual mixed group of which the neighbourhood and the school are so proud.
Yet it was not only this night that did not end benignly; Mr. Babikian's Armenian Community Centre used to run bingos at the Peanut Plaza, but they were cancelled about five years ago, he said, because people were intimidated by the large crowds of young people in the mall.
"It was not safe" for people to come, Mr. Babikian said. "Many of the people were older, and they said we like the bingo, but we don't feel safe."
"Ninety per cent of the time," one educator said yesterday, "the 90 per cent co-exist and enjoy one another's differences. It's the 10 per cent that kills us."
It may be in that 10 per cent are literally those who killed Mr. Kocherga, too.