Driver using van in Toronto kills 10 injures 15

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A van struck and killed 10 pedestrians Monday afternoon in north Toronto and the driver fled the scene, Canadian police said. Fifteen others were injured in the incident. Authorities said the van has been found and the driver was in custody. Police said they did not yet know the cause or any possible motive.

CBS News sources identified the suspect as Alek Minassian, 25, and obtained a photo of him from social media Monday. Officials announced he's from Richmond Hill -- a town in Ontario, Canada. They said that the suspect was not know previously to police.

U.S. law enforcement sources told CBS News that the incident appears to be a deliberate act. Witnesses said the driver was moving fast and appeared to be acting deliberately.

Witness Peter Kang told CTV News that the driver did not seem to make any effort to stop.

"If it was an accident he would have stopped," Kang said. "But the person just went through the sidewalk. He could have stopped."

Minister of Public Safety Ralph Goodale said that it was too soon to say whether the crash was a case of international terrorism and that the government had not raised its terrorism alert.

Toronto Police Services Deputy Chief Peter Yuen released no details about the investigation as he announced the casualties.

Yuen said police were still interviewing witnesses and examining surveillance video of the incident as part of what he called a "complex" investigation.

The incident occurred as Cabinet ministers from the major industrial countries were gathered in Canada to discuss a range of international issues in the run-up to the G7 meeting near Quebec City in June. The driver was heading south on busy Yonge Street around 1:30 p.m. and the streets were crowded with people enjoying an unseasonably warm day when the van jumped onto the sidewalk.

Cellphone video showed bystanders frantically giving CPR to victims moments after the van struck pedestrians. Witnesses said the plowed into dozens of pedestrians at 40 mph, leaving a trail of destruction.

"He just went on the sidewalk," a distraught Shaker said. "He just started hitting everybody, man. He hit every single person on the sidewalk. Anybody in his way he would hit."

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on Twitter that he was monitoring the situation.

The driver is reportedly a 25 year old male. Also reportedly inspired by what is known as the Incel Rebellion and Elliot Rodger. The incel Rebellion is full of involuntary celibate men and some women.

Shortly after Minassian’s name was made public, a Facebook post spread online that was apparently written by the suspect. The posting read, “Private (Recruit) Minassian Infantry 00010, wishing to speak to Sgt. 4chan please. C23249161. The Incel Rebellion has already begun! We will overthrow all the Chads and Stacys! All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!” The posting has not been confirmed as legitimate. It was posted on the same day as the van incident.

The Guardian reported in November 2017 that Reddit had banned a subreddit named, Incels. At the time it was removed, there were over 40,000 members of the page. A common theme on those Reddit pages were “Chads,” men who have casual sex with women.

A Change.org petition that spread in the summer of 2017 accused the group of advocating rape with titles of pages on subreddit including, “All women are sluts” and “Reasons why women are the embodiment of evil.”

The Guardian report adds that users on the subreddit who were viewed as too friendly to women were warned and subsequently banned if their behavior didn’t degenerate. Women were commonly referred to as “Femoids” on the page.

According to a study from Grinnell College on the Incel Movement, another common name for women on the site is “Stacy.” The study reads, “The female counterpart of a Chad is called a “Stacy,” and she is viewed as unattainable. Incels talk about Chads in a reverent way, while talking about Stacies in a hateful way. They strive to be Chads, but demean the Stacies Chad is allegedly having sex with.”

The Grinnell study adds that many in the Incel Movement subreddit were also active in alt-right pages such as “The Red Pill,” “Mens Rights” and “Men Going Their Own Way.” A Quartz piece included words such as “femoids” and “Chad” as being part of a new alt-right dictionary. That same article mentions that some on the subreddit referred to Elliot Rodger as “Saint Elliot” because he “martyred” himself for the Incel cause.

Despite the misogyny associated with the group, it was a woman who says she started the movement. A Canadian woman named Alana told Elle Magazine in March 2016 that she started the Incel Movement in 1993. Alana said that after thinking she was heterosexual but then dating and breaking up with a woman, she wanted to try “to create a movement that was open to anybody and everybody.”

Alana then built an early website named, “Alana’s Involuntary Celibacy Project.” Alana said that the page was populated with stories from women but mainly men. The article says that the men “were prone to antagonistic, repetitive complaining, she truly wanted her project to be a home for all incels; rigid gender norms, she thought, burdened every- one.”

When Alana learned of Elliot Rodger’s connection to the movement, she told Elle about her thoughts, “Like a scientist who invented something that ended up being a weapon of war, I can’t uninvent this word, nor restrict it to the nicer people who need it.”

A former site admin for IncelSupport, Rebecca Freeman, wrote on Quora that the group is “not a movement; we have never protested or made any request for rights — or anything like that. We do not much resemble the stereotypes and tropes many feminist groups like to use against us.”

Freeman added that “likely some biological cause. Therefore, I think we should be viewed as a type of gender.” In her conclusion, Freeman wrote, “It’s worth remembering that Adolf Hitler had a partner. So did many well known serial killers and rapists. They were not dangerous because of sexual frustration or an inability to fit in. They were simply evil people.”

A website named Love-Shy.com, offers “support for the dating-challenged.” In an FAQ section to help users determine if they are incels or love shy, a passage reads, “The suffering of incels is often the same as those of love-shys.” The difference, according to that section, is that incel people view themselves as being further away from the social mainstream.

The BBC is reporting he attended a special needs school, just waiting for the psycho-aspie accusations to start now.

On Monday night police cordoned off a Richmond Hill home property records show belong to Vahe and Sona Minassian. Officers first arrived around 3:30 p.m., neighbours said. A Haig Minassian, three years older than Alek Minassian, has also listed the address as home in bankruptcy records.

In 2009, Sona Minassian was quoted in a story in the Richmond Hill Liberal lamenting that her son, who suffered from a form of autism called Asperger syndrome, was at risk of losing access to a special program called Helpmate that assisted the teen to “work though his cognitive barriers and prepare him for the workplace.”

“My son would spend afternoons working with Helpmate. They were sensitive to his needs and now he has a job at Compugen here in town,” she said, referring to an IT company in Richmond Hill.

“He was able to take the experience provided by Helpmate and apply it. This kind of service for my son wasn’t available elsewhere. I am convinced that if we didn’t have Helpmate, my son would not have had such an opportunity.”

The article did not mention the name of the son.

^^^I will have to google that, I would not have thought that ER would have become a martyr to some.

Mr. Minassian appeared in a north Toronto court Tuesday morning. He was charged with 10 counts of murder and 13 of attempted murder after being arrested Monday afternoon, shortly after a white van drove for more than two kilometres down Yonge Street in the northern part of Toronto, hitting pedestrians along the way.

“Private (Recruit) Minassian Infantry 00010, wishing to speak to Sgt 4chan please,” the original Facebook post reads. “C23249161. The Incel Rebellion has already begun! We will overthrow all the Chads and Stacys! All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!

Quickly after the Facebook post was first shared online Monday night, there was skepticism whether the post was legitimate.

On 4chan itself, many cast doubt whether the post was written by Mr. Minassian. Some noted that the writing style of an online gaming account, which appears to belong to Mr. Minassian, is significantly different than that in the Facebook post. Others on 4chan wondered why someone would use Facebook to share the message, and not the online message board itself.

In the post, Mr. Minassian uses a series of letters and numbers which appear to be a unique identifier for a post on a subchannel of 4chan dedicated to anime, although it doesn’t correspond to an actual post.

Online social-media users noted that even if the Facebook page does belong to Mr. Minassian, it does not mean the post was necessarily written by him. Facebook makes it possible to back-date posts, leaving the appearance that it could have been written at a very specific time of the day, when it was actually written much later. If Mr. Minassian did not use advanced security settings to protect his account, a would-be hacker may have been readily able to gain access to his account and spoof the post.

4chan users have duped the media in the past following a mass murder or a crisis, and have consistently tried to trick journalists into misidentifying suspects in mass shooting incidents. The online community of trolls has also attempted to take credit for major news in the past, claiming in 2017 that they were behind allegations that would later surface in a dossier regarding U.S. President Donald Trump’s ties to Russia. That claim had little basis in fact.

Mr. Minassian appeared in court wearing a white police-issued jumpsuit.

“Mr. Minassian is the alleged driver of the van that killed 10 people and injured many others on Yonge Street yesterday afternoon,” assistant Crown attorney Joe Callaghan said.

Justice of the Peace Stephen Waisberg established a no-contact order between Mr. Minassian and the 13 people who were injured Monday.

Mr. Minassian will remain in custody until he returns to court by video remand on May 10.

The driver is reportedly a 25 year old male. Also reportedly inspired by what is known as the Incel Rebellion and Elliot Rodger. The incel Rebellion is full of involuntary celibate men and some women.

Probably zero women...

You would be surprised that one article linked on this thread suggests that a women founded this incel group. The problem is that men dominated the group.

Reports the man connected to Monday’s van rampage on Yonge St. may suffer from Asperger syndrome, have shaken advocates in Ontario’s autism community.

But violent behaviour is not typically associated with the disorder, said Margaret Spoelstra executive director of Autism Ontario.

“Autism and mental health (problems) are not synonymous. Autism is a neuro-biological disorder. But it is not about violence,” she said Tuesday. “Autism is not the reason someone gets behind the wheel of a van and plows through a crowd of people.”

However, Minassian’s classmates at Sixteenth Ave. Public School, Thornlea Secondary School and Seneca College, described him as socially awkward, someone who kept to himself and who would frequently fidget or twitch. He was also a computer whiz.

The Canadian Mental Health Association has also urged people against connecting mental illness with violence, noting that those who suffer from mental health challenges are far more likely to self-harm or be a victim of violence than to be violent themselves.