November 18, 1988 – December 3, 2004
Fri, January 14, 2005
‘Here for Drew’
By MICHELE MANDEL
They solemnly file into youth court, a small army of teens in puffy jackets, baggy pants and white T-shirts emblazoned with his face.
Drew Stewart’s face.
“In loving memory,” the shirt reads on the front. “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good,” it says on the back.
The kids take their seats near Stewart’s grieving mom, Cheryl, to offer her support, to offer her comfort. But all eyes are on the witness box and the tall, baby-faced youth who stands charged with the December stabbing death of their friend.
Nicole cannot take her eyes off the 17-year-old accused, who can not be named under the Youth Criminal Justice Act. She stares at his short hair, his winter sweater, his expressionless face.
“To me, it looked like he didn’t really care,” she says after his brief appearance in the hectic courtroom. “I tried to make eye contact, but he wouldn’t look back. He’s a piece of s–t.”
She is tough yet pretty, her dark hair pulled back off her face, a row of braces on her front teeth. She was Stewart’s friend, she says. They shared classes and basketball and his last conscious moments as he lay dying on the sidewalk outside a Coxwell Ave. restaurant. And so she is consumed by anger as she catches her first glimpse of the teen now accused of his murder.
“My friend is gone,” she says fiercely. “I don’t have that friend anymore. He’s not there to protect everyone, especially the girls. He had the girls’ backs and now he’s not there anymore.”
She was with Stewart that Friday noon of Dec. 3 when he collapsed after being swarmed by a group of about 15 teens. Witnesses said the Grade 10 student at East York Collegiate was trying to defend a pregnant friend when he was beaten and stabbed multiple times.
“I was there when he died,” Nicole says quietly. “It’s just so hard. It’s something I think about 100 million, trillion times a day. I was right beside Drew. I saw him fall to the ground. I know CPR so my first thought was, ‘Is he breathing?’
“He was. I kept telling him, ‘You’re going to be okay, Drew. You’re going to be okay once we get you to the hospital.
“He was okay for like five minutes, then he wasn’t. I was shouting, ‘Wake up! Wake up! …”
But her 16-year-old friend was gone. Stewart would later be pronounced dead at St. Michael’s hospital.
Three weeks later a teen was charged with first-degree murder, the first of several more expected arrests. Drew’s friends were asked to stay away from his first court appearance last month, for fear their emotions would run too high. But Nicole couldn’t stay away anymore –none of them could. “This is an event for our boy so we don’t care about school,” explained a pal who goes by the nickname “Smokey.” “We’re here for Drew. We stand here for Drew.”
And in his honour they each wore the T-shirt Drew’s mom had given them in memory of her only child.
“He (allegedly) took our friend’s life,” Nicole says. “We want him to see our friend’s face until the day he dies. I don’t know if he cares, but I want him to see my friend’s face.”
There were no outbursts in court, no hisses, no tears. They would never make a scene, she says, for they respect Drew’s mother too much. And a month after the murder, the raw shock of it has worn away, leaving only anger and emptiness in its place.
“It sucks that he’s not here,” Nicole says, “but life does go on.” Though not as before. This generation of kids raised on video games and movies and TV programs splattered with imaginary blood tend to think that death is not real.
That has all changed now at East York Collegiate, Nicole says. “You see it on the news, but when it actually happens to you it’s completely different. Now, when I see it on TV, it’s a whole different thing. Everyone is someone to somebody else.
“The whole school understands the value of human life now. Before, they didn’t.”
She carries Stewart’s picture in her wallet and often wears the memorial T-shirt, especially when she is down. She likes how people stop and look at its message, how it makes them stop and think, if only for a second.
She just wishes whoever killed her friend had done the same.
“I don’t think he realized what he did. I think if he could go back and change it, he would.”
Nicole hesitates then, and any sympathy she felt for her friend’s killers is gone as quickly as it appeared.
“On the other hand,” she says, before returning to her friends, “people don’t walk around with weapons unless they’re going to use them.”