Toronto Star Classroom Connection

‘I want to be able to tell his mother I was there for him’

Woman who held hand of dying teen reaches out to his family

DHRITI GUPTA

Angela Shintani-Sandrowicz is at the Keele TTC station again — the third time since Saturday night. While it’s her home stop, she’s not there to take a bus or the subway.

She has come to process her thoughts and emotions about bearing witness to the last minutes of Gabriel Magalhaes’s life.

It was around 9 p.m. Saturday. Shintani-Sandrowicz, 45, and her wife had come to put funds on their Presto cards. Their car had broken down just before March break, and so they had started to use public transit more often. They chose to see the positives — it saved money and offered a new way to explore the city with their children. And without her hands on a steering wheel, Shintani-Sandrowicz could interact with her kids more, even brushing their hair on the mornings they forgot.

After they filled their Presto cards, the couple walked toward the benches to look at a board on the station’s lower level. That’s where 16-year-old Magalhaes had been sitting. He was with a friend, heading home after a day out, when he was attacked, unprovoked and at random.

Shintani-Sandrowicz, a Toronto District School Board lunch supervisor, hadn’t heard a sound and tried to understand the scene in front of her.

A boy was on the ground and his friend was beside him in shock. Shintani-Sandrowicz heard another couple mention a seizure and thought she could help — one of her own three kids had experienced one before.

“I went over and looked at him, but didn’t see him shaking in any way,” she recalled. “That’s when I heard someone say he’d been stabbed.”

She peeled back his coat to reveal a gaping wound on the left side of his chest; she remembered hearing our hearts are closer to the middle, and she hoped it was true. Putting Magalhaes’s coat back over the wound, her hands one on top of the other, Shintani-Sandrowicz pressed down.

“All I knew was to apply pressure to try and stop the bleeding.”

Like magic, she said, she remembers two nurses stepping in, also bystanders. A first-aid kit arrived soon after. One of the nurses began compressions, telling Shintani-Sandrowicz that Magalhaes’s breathing was poor and specifying the kind of breathing pattern he was exhibiting.

“I tried to look it up later, but I couldn’t figure it out,” she said. “I wish I had more skills, more knowledge. And maybe if I did, I would have been able to do more.”

After the nurses cut open his shirt, Shintani-Sandrowicz could tell their focus had changed. She held his head and his hand as she spoke to him.

“Stay with us. Come on, you can do this. Stay with us, you’re doing OK. You’re going to be all right.”

After paramedics transported Magalhaes to a hospital, Shintani-Sandrowicz realized his blood was on her hands, her bracelet, her coat. She looked over at the first-aid kit strewn across the floor, and picked up a small alcohol wipe, before someone from the TTC showed her to a washroom.

Shintani-Sandrowicz and her wife were let out of the then closed Keele station. From High Park station, they boarded the 89 Weston bus and headed home, where their eldest had been looking after their younger two kids. At the time, still in shock, Shintani-Sandrowicz wasn’t upset. “I was just hoping and hoping that he was going to be OK,” she said. “I guess it’s funny how trauma works.”

She later learned from the news that Magalhaes had died. Later still, she learned his name. In the Star, she read the words of his mother, Andrea.

“He was loved, he was happy, he had dreams,” Andrea had shared about her son. “I trusted the system. I trusted public transit. Now, I am 100 per cent hopeless.”

Shintani-Sandrowicz reached out to a Star reporter to ask that her contact information be shared with Andrea. She wants her to know her son wasn’t alone.

“I want to be able to tell his mother I was there for him, and that I held his hand,” she said. “So she knows there was another mother there, caring for her son.”

During one of her visits to the memorial set up outside Keele station, Shintani-Sandrowicz met one of Magalhaes’s friends and shared with him that she had been there. “We had a very, very long hug.” Shintani-Sandrowicz wonders if things could have been done differently to save his life.

“It’s so hard to say, and I don’t really want to go there because we can’t turn back time,” she said. “No one wants this to ever happen again. No one wants to see a child murdered.”

“But it’s going to continue to happen, if we don’t change things.”

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2023-03-31T07:00:00.0000000Z

2023-03-31T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://torontostarnie.pressreader.com/article/281509345448583

Toronto Star Newspapers Limited