Saturday, November 18, 2017

Delving into the murder of Shoeshine Boy Emanuel Jaques


Robert J. Hoshowsky is the author of The Last to Die: Ronald Turpin, Arthur Lucas, and the End of Capital Punishment in Canada, and Unsolved: True Canadian Cold Cases. A former Maclean’s researcher-reporter, Hoshowsky regularly appears on television discussing murders, most recently Hours to Kill, a 26-part True Crime series airing worldwide.

The following is an excerpt from Outraged: The Murder of Shoeshine Boy Emanuel Jaques and How It Changed a City:
For Emanuel Jaques, the sleaze of the Yonge Street strip was about as far removed from his life back in Portugal as one could possibly imagine. Immigrating from the North Atlantic’s Azores archipelago, Emanuel’s father, Valdemiro, arrived in Toronto in 1972 and worked as a cleaner before arranging to bring over his wife and six other children in 1974. For the Jaques family — and thousands of others from Portugal — Canada and the United States were seen as lands of opportunity. 
Like many other immigrant families, they settled in an area of Toronto which was affordable, on Shuter St. in Regent Park, east of downtown. It was from here 12-year-old Emanuel, his brother Luciano, 14, and friend Shane McLean, 12, set out for the busy downtown intersection to make a few dollars. Although his parents were initially reluctant to let him go without adult supervision, Emanuel pressured them until they relented; after all, he was with his older brother. A number of other kids they knew had been shining shoes for weeks downtown, and the northeast corner of Yonge and Dundas — right near a streetcar stop and a subway entrance — wasn’t some isolated part of the city, but a busy area populated with thousands of pedestrians and cars every day. The parents agreed the boys could head downtown to shine shoes, where they went every day, except Sundays.  (more...)


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