A 24-year-old man killed in a fatal shooting at the Eaton Centre on the weekend was laid to rest at a funeral in Etobicoke Tuesday afternoon.
Hundreds of mourners gathered at the Khalid Bin Walid mosque, in the Kipling Avenue and Rexdale Boulevard area, to remember Ahmed Hassan who was killed when gunshots rang out in the mall's food court early Saturday evening.
Six others, including a 13-year-old boy, were also injured in the shooting.
Ibrahim Absiye, a friend of Hassan's family, said that such incidents are not what he and others had come to Canada hoping to find.
"We came running from bullets to find peace," he said. "It is just sad that we are losing young people who have bright futures"
Abdifatah Warsame, a youth mentor in attendance at the funeral, said Hassan's death has had a widespread affect.
"We lost a young man from our community, and the community is grieving," Warsame said.
According to a Somali settlement services centre, Hassan and his family moved to Toronto in the 1990s to escape the civil war.
Friends said Hassan recently moved back to the city from Edmonton.
Police have charged 23-year-old Christopher Husbands with first-degree murder in Hassan's death. Husbands, who was on house arrest at the time of the shooting, is also charged with six counts of attempted murder.
Investigators said Hassan was targeted, but police don't believe the homicide was related to gang activity, despite the fact the suspect, Hassan and a man who was critically wounded in the shooting all purportedly belong to the same gang.
