A Toronto man has pleaded guilty to killing one woman and trying to kill another on behalf of a female-hating community that he had joined online.
The man, who cannot be identified under the terms of the Youth Criminal Justice Act because he was 17 at the time, was charged with first-degree murder and attempted murder in connection with the February, 2020, attack at a massage parlour close to his home.
The plea does not cover terrorism charges that were laid months later, the first such charges in connection with an attack inspired by incel ideology. The incel (involuntary celibate) subculture is a violent online collective of misogynistic men who blame women for their inability to find a sexual partner. Ontario Superior Court of Justice judge Suhail Akhtar has yet to decide whether the deadly violence amounts to an act of terrorism. Prosecutors will make that argument at hearings later this week.
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During the proceedings on Wednesday, the man pleaded guilty to the murder-related charges and admitted that his plot was hatched to advance the aims of the incel movement.
Federal lawyers have started to invoke Canada’s 2001 anti-terrorism act to classify such homicides as hate crimes. Using a terrorism bill created to combat the threat of al-Qaeda signals that the courts will condemn other kinds of extremists. Terrorism and murder charges are also pending in the case of a 21-year-old who is accused of killing four members of a Muslim family in London, Ont., last year by running them over with a pickup truck.
The details of the Feb. 24, 2020, massage parlour attack are laid out in an agreed statement of facts read into the court record this week. The statement refers to the weapon used as a sword, although witnesses called it a machete.
In a house where he lived with his parents, the 17-year-old donned dark glasses and a dark coat that concealed a 17-inch blade. He walked to a Dufferin Street erotic massage parlour at noon. There, he slashed at the neck of a woman who was working at the front desk as a receptionist.
Authorities said Ashley Noelle Arzaga died of 42 sharp-force injuries. “These were fatal wounds that would have caused death rapidly due to external and internal blood loss,” reads the agreed statement of facts.
A woman inside the building who leapt to her aid was stabbed repeatedly. But she managed to grab the weapon and incapacitate the teenager by stabbing him in the back.
When a paramedic asked the wounded attacker what had happened, he said: “I wanted to kill everybody in the building and I’m happy I got one,” according to the agreed statement of facts.
Police found a handwritten note in the front left pocket of the attacker’s coat reading “Long Live The Incel Rebellion.” Computers seized from his basement bedroom later revealed to police that he had alluded to his violent intents in messages on online forums and that he had searched terms such as “incel” and “incel rebellion” and “What is the ‘incel’ movement?”
Five weeks after the attacks, two homicide detectives interviewed the accused. When he was asked how he chose his victims, he said, “I just thought they, they weren’t very clean people.” Later, he added that “you don’t choose to become an incel, you are just born one.”
According to the agreed statement of facts, he said he wrote the “Long Live The Incel Rebellion” note to draw attention to his actions. “I wanted everyone to find it, I wanted [the world] to know … that it’s people like us exist and it’s not really fair,” he said.
He told police he had been planning his attacks for months.
Police then asked him about another adherent to the incel cause, a Toronto man since convicted of the city’s worst mass killing. In 2018, that attacker rented a cube van and ran over victims chosen at random. He killed 11 people and wounded 15 others.
For the teenager in the same city who would strike two years later, this was an inspiration, according to the agreed statement of facts. “I thought if he could do that, especially so close in Canada in Toronto City, I thought it was possible for me to do something like that as well,” he told detectives.
Colin Freeze