HUNTER: Mean season is here for busy cops, mourning families

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“It gonna be a helluva summer.” — Jimmy Conway (Robert De Niro), GoodFellas

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The brazen daytime assassination of Alisseaha Golar-Kotlar in a Vaughan shopping centre parking lot was the ugly preliminary.

Just 21, cops say the Hamilton woman was targeted for death on June 18, a few days before the official summer kick-off. York Regional Police detectives arrested two in that slaying.

Three days later, a gunman walked into a Vaughan home — again, in the middle of the day — and shot four people. Two of them died, Thi Trang Do, 40, and her two-year-old son Marcus Vu. Cops again arrested the alleged killer.

Donovan Wynn, 47, was stabbed to death at Allan Gardens on June 19. On Saturday, O’Brien Todd, 26, of Toronto was found deceased following a restaurant fire.

Last Thursday, a father, mother and their two children were found dead at a rural home in southwestern Ontario.

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Any cop will tell you that summer is when the violence simmering in some boils over into a lethal rage. Without fail, the homicide rate spikes every single summer.

“Typically there’s a lot more murders in the summer,” one veteran homicide detective told the Toronto Sun. “People are more out and about, there’s more interaction, the kids are not in school and there’s a lot more boozing.”

Those factors have been present since time immemorial. But the pandemic has also sent scores of people over the edge.

In Canada, anger is in the air with the predominant notion that things have gotten much worse for the average Joe or Josephine.

“With the state Canada is in, people are more and more desperate and that’s creating a ton of mental health issues,” the detective said. “It’s the result of people not being able to survive.

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“I’m not just talking about the homeless and other unfortunate folks but working people. It’s unfortunate, but the increase in murders, shootings and stabbings is a result of this.”

And life in the big city has not gotten easier. Housing and grocery costs, difficulty in just getting around and the agonizing knowledge that the city, province and country appear incapable of doing anything right can send one’s blood pressure spiralling skyward.

Throw in the streets being closed every weekend for a war 5,000 km away and you’re lighting a fuse.

In the 1985 Kurt Russell thriller The Mean Season, the title refers to a late summer weather pattern in Florida. Anyone who has endured it knows its sweat-drenched fury.

It’s hot, sticky mornings followed by violent thunderstorms rolling in from the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico.

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But the rain doesn’t ease the heat, it makes things hotter. Rinse and repeat.

I associate soaring mercury with the mean season but tie in violence as tempers and frustrations explode.

On the one hand, summer eternally resembles a Beach Boys soundtrack. On the other hand, the coming heat is a harbinger of tragedy and tears.

This propensity for violence is not isolated to our packed metropolises.

Cops in Fredericton say that on Friday, two 17-year-olds stabbed to death Mark Albert Brooks. He was 71. Two kids allegedly killed an old man.

Of course, the youths’ identities are protected under the Youth Criminal Justice Act.

Welcome to the mean season.

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@HunterTOSun

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