GWILT o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2007-07-03 published
Toddler dies after dog mauling
By Alwynne
GWILT and Unnati
GANDHI,
Page▼ A6
Smiths Falls, Ontario and Toronto -- A 17-month-old girl was
mauled to death by a family dog over the long weekend.
Korie-Lyn EDWARDS's family had gathered at her grandmother's
rural house in Montague Township, about 80 kilometres southwest
of Ottawa, for the Canada Day weekend.
About 6: 30 p.m. on Sunday, the toddler wandered over to where
her grandmother's 10-year-old Rottweiler-German Shepherd was
chained in the backyard.
The dog attacked.
"She suffered obviously fatal injuries to the head," Ontario
Provincial
Police
Constable Kevin
DAVIDSON said yesterday.
Korie-Lyn's parents rushed her to Perth and Smiths Falls District
Hospital, he said.
She was then immediately airlifted to the Children's Hospital
of Eastern Ontario in Ottawa where she succumbed to her injuries.
An autopsy was performed yesterday, but results weren't immediately
available.
The dog had no history of aggressive behaviour, Constable
DAVIDSON
said, and it had been socialized with various family members
and children.
"That's what makes this situation that much more tragic," the
constable said yesterday.
The dog was taken into custody by animal control, and, at the
family's request, is scheduled to be put down today.
Constable DAVIDSON said no charges are pending.
No one was at the family's duplex in Smiths Falls yesterday -
about six kilometres west of the grandmother's home - where two
strollers were in view near a large maple tree with wind chimes
in the front yard.
The couple, both in their 20s, had moved in two months ago with
their young daughter, said Dino
MUSCA, their landlord. He said
he often saw the mother taking walks around the neighbourhood
with the girl in a stroller. The family did not own a car.
"They were keeping to themselves a lot, but I know a lot of people
in town know them," he said, adding that the mother had come
to his house once to use the phone.
Around the back of the home, a Dora the Explorer patio set was
clearly visible, along with a large children's paddling pool
with toys still floating in it.
On the front door, a sign that read "Parking For Pitbull" was
above another that read, "Owners only. Violators better haul
ass."
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GWILT o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2007-08-10 published
One of Canada's last explorers, he mapped vast regions of the
North
Ottawa scientist who spent 35 years working for the Geological
Survey of Canada found rock stardom in the wilderness as a pre-eminent
expert on Precambrian formations
By Alwynne
GWILT,
Page▲ S9
Fred TAILOR/TAYLOR was one of Canada's last explorers. A scientist with
boots and a backpack, he mapped vast areas of the geologically
unknown North to accumulate a motherlode of data about the rocks,
minerals and formations that make up one of the largest and oldest
landmasses on Earth. His maps are still used for exploration
today and some have said he deserves a medal for the amount of
territory he covered in his years of service to the Geological
Survey of Canada.
He hadn't always intended to be a geologist. He grew up in London,
amid the rich, loamy farmlands characteristic of that part of
Ontario, and hankered to be a veterinarian. A child of the Depression,
he was raised in his grandmother Elizabeth's home on Simcoe Street,
where he lived with his English immigrant parents, Samuel and
Lydia. It was a time when few people had jobs and his family
often did without. It was a hardship that would affect Doctor
TAILOR/TAYLOR
in later years.
By the time the Second World War came around, he was a lean 13-year
old whose height made him look older than he was. In 1942, he
signed up illegally as an underage army recruit, but it was not
until 1945 that he made it overseas. He fought in Holland, Belgium,
Germany and France, an experience he seldom talked about except
for the inexplicable remark that he owed his life to his general.
When peace returned, he was demobilized and given two choices
by the government: a home or an education. Not yet 20 when the
war ended, he thought about where an education might take him.
A house was for older men. In 1946, he applied to veterinary
school at the University of Western Ontario, only to be disappointed.
Apparently, so many former servicemen wanted to be vets that
the school asked him to select a different major. For no particular
reason, he chose geology. The decision changed the course of
his life.
By all accounts, it was a year of major life developments. At
a traditional Saturday-night dance at the local arena, where
boys lined one wall and girls the other wall until someone broke
the ice, Doctor
TAILOR/TAYLOR picked out a 22-year-old employee of an insurance
agency employee named Shirley and asked her to dance. Later that
evening, he walked her home and a romance took root.
In the early years, they bonded over her access to technology:
She had a typewriter; he had essays to write. By 1949, those
key strokes had earned him a degree in geology and a hand in
marriage. After a September wedding, they took off for postgraduate
studies at McGill University in Montreal. It was a time of renewed
poverty. At $90 a month, his government veteran's stipend was
hardly enough to sustain them. Shirley got a job, and they postponed
having children.
He left McGill with a doctorate (although he loathed being addressed
as "Dr. TAILOR/TAYLOR") and landed at job with Cominco in Trail, British
Columbia
There, the
TAYLORs started their family. Daughter Virginia
was born in a Cranbrook hospital in January, 1954, and son Mark
arrived 11 months later in Ottawa.
By then, Doctor
TAILOR/TAYLOR had accepted a job at the Geological Survey
of Canada. As an expert in Precambrian rock formations, he was
on track to rock stardom. Strong and fit, and with a bent for
exploration, it was his job to go to remote regions, take samples
and create detailed maps -- often of places where none existed.
Each summer began the same way: In June, his children tearfully
waved goodbye and he departed on another dangerous four-month
mission in the North. The bush planes were unsophisticated, the
bears ran rampant and the weather dictated what he and others
in his party would eat that week. (If supplies couldn't get in,
it was oatmeal for breakfast, lunch and dinner.) For Doctor
TAILOR/TAYLOR,
though, it was all a grand adventure -- if sometimes perilous.
One summer, he was stranded in northern Manitoba with four student
geologists, forgotten by their pilot. Without a radio to contact
the outside world, they were running out of food and living mainly
on fish when he made a bold decision. Selecting one of the students,
he left the others in camp and canoed south along the shore of
Hudson's Bay to Churchill, a 150-kilometre journey that demanded
long days of paddling with little to eat.
It was a long and arduous voyage along a hostile coast that could
be negotiated only in daylight hours. When evening came, they
went ashore and made camp. One night, Doctor
TAILOR/TAYLOR woke up with
the awful realization that he had forgotten about the tide. The
canoe had drifted out and he had to jump in the water and go
after it. When finally they reached Churchill, he went ashore
in such a fury that he stalked into the airplane company office,
found the errant pilot and punched him out.
Over the years, there were few parts of the North that did not
feel the sole of Doctor
TAILOR/TAYLOR's boots. Some seasons, he and his
team covered a different area every day. In the early years,
that meant the eastern half of Hill Island Lake and Snowbird
Lake in the District of Mackenzie, along with Shethanei Lake
in Manitoba. Called reconnaissance missions, the teams would
break up and explore grids that had been laid out over a simple
map. Each grid square had to be individually detailed, with samples
gathered.
"It was exciting to find new formations that no one had ever
discovered before," said Doctor Hulbert Lee, who first worked with
Dr. TAILOR/TAYLOR in 1953. "These maps have stood the test of time."
Dr. TAILOR/TAYLOR covered about 22 kilometres a day, returning to camp
near the end of each long Northern evening with a pack full of
rock samples. He'd make dinner out of whatever canned food was
available and pack the next day's lunch before settling down
in a rough tent to write up his notes and sleep. Eventually,
the notes became full-fledged papers that found homes in 65 scholarly
publications between 1956 and 1986.
Perhaps his most important work was a five-year mapping of the
Torngat Mountains on the Labrador Peninsula. Between 1966 and
1971, Doctor
TAILOR/TAYLOR helped run one of the last helicopter reconnaissance
missions in Canada. Transported by Bell 47 G2 helicopters, he
mapped areas by grid division. Pilots would land as close as
possible to a designated grid point, and with the rotor blades
still whirling, Doctor
TAILOR/TAYLOR would jump out and grab a rock sample,
make notes about the area and take a reading of the minerals.
He was then flown to the next grid. Every day, he performed as
many as 50 such traverses. By the end of 1971, the work had led
to the completion of 18 mapping sheets at the 1: 250,000 scale.
The maps are still in use today.
"It sounds like boring work… but it was absolutely necessary
to cover the country," said Richard Herd, the curator of national
collections at the Geological Survey of Canada.
Yet it wasn't all so repetitive. There were encounters with polar
bears, the trading of sugar for soapstone rubbings and some of
the best salmon fishing in the world. One summer in the Torngat
Mountains, Doctor
TAILOR/TAYLOR took a fellow geologist to a secret fishing
hole. "He pointed out a place and the helicopter pilot flew backwards
into the canyon," said Bill Morgan, who worked with Doctor
TAILOR/TAYLOR
in 1969 and 1972. "No one had ever fished in there. It was just
incredible."
Every autumn, Doctor
TAILOR/TAYLOR returned to Ottawa fed up with eating
canned food. His first order of business would be to eat a fresh
tomato out of the back garden. For the rest of the year, he would
rewrite his notes and review his findings.
Family life was spent coaching his sons' hockey teams, attending
school plays and spending a lot of time with the children.
In 1974, he and his wife divorced after 25 years of marriage.
He bought the family home for himself and continued at Geological
Survey of Canada until 1989. He never threw anything away, a
compulsion that harked back to his days of childhood poverty,
but remained an outdoorsman. He stayed fit by playing tennis,
and tended a large vegetable garden and some giant white and
red-speckled begonias that had been passed down to him from his
grandmother's garden. His eyes never came to rest on another
polar bear, but he was blessed by a pair of falcons that nested
in his backyard.
Fred TAILOR/TAYLOR was born in London, Ontario, on November 11, 1925.
He died in Ottawa on July 3, 2007, of a heart attack after suffering
complications from a rare blood disorder. He was 81. He is survived
by his three children, Virginia, Mark and Craig.
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GWILT o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2007-10-10 published
Detective with a steel-trap memory excelled at undercover surveillance
He did everything from wire tapping to following vehicles, even
though weaving in and out of traffic while remaining undetected
by a suspect is not for everyone
By Alwynne
GWILT,
Special to The Globe and Mail, Page S10
John (Freebie)
FREEMAN was a York Regional detective in Ontario
who never gave up a case until all the parts of the puzzle were
perfectly in place. For much of his career, he was a surveillance
expert with a steel-trap memory who knew the name, address and
activities of every bad guy in his bailiwick.
The son of a dentist father and a homemaker mother, he grew up
in a two-storey brick home on Chine Drive in Scarborough, now
part of Toronto. As a boy, he was surrounded by a large extended
family. In 1964, his father and uncle bought an outdoor skating
rink that they called Little Switzerland; it was the job of the
family men to keep it up, packing snow down and flooding it on
cold winter nights. He spent a couple of winters with his cousin,
Greg, working at the rink, before both families decided to go
rural and move to the village of Zephyr, just north of Uxbridge,
Ontario, where home became about 80 hectares of blissful farmland.
Along with his cousins, he bused 15 kilometres every day to attend
secondary school in Uxbridge.
But country life was not for him. As soon as he turned 19, he
joined the Toronto Metro Police. For a young man who loved almost
any kind of motor vehicle, the highlight of joining so young
was to be assigned the use of a Harley Davidson police motorcycle.
They were fast times: From his motor bikes to his new job and
a marriage at 21 to Ellen Dianne
HENDERSON,
Mr.
FREEMAN left
city life nearly as quickly as he entered it. After only four
years in Toronto, he moved north to York Regional Police, where
he would spend the rest of his career. In 1975, he began work
as a uniformed officer in Newmarket, Ontario
Five years later, he was selected to be part of York Region's
first surveillance unit. He had a near-photographic memory that
was perfect for the job, and there was rarely a criminal whose
name, address and activities he did not know by heart or could
not recount easily to colleagues. Friends considered him a walking
computer and liked to ask random questions simply to see whether
he knew the answer.
As part of the Special Sections Unit, his work entailed everything
from wire tapping to following vehicles. It was his love of driving
that really cut him out as the person to tail cars. Weaving in
and out of traffic while remaining undetected by the suspect
is not a job for every police officer, but it was a skill that
Mr. FREEMAN mastered, according to York Regional Police Chief
Armand LA BARGE.
"If you're careless, you'd never survive," Mr. LA
BARGE said.
"But he had abilities beyond the norm, and there was a passion
in Craig."
But Mr. FREEMAN possessed more than just memory skills and excelled
at connecting with people through his quiet wit and friendly
manner. Known as Freebie, he possessed a relaxed demeanour that
came in handy when a situation needed to be defused. Answering
a complaint about a noisy bar in nearby Vaughan, he convinced
the owner that, rather than trying to lower the decibels, maybe
the party should be fully shut down. Where most police officers
would get an angry response, Mr.
FREEMAN found respect.
Colleagues said you could also never tell whether he was serious
or joking. Wes
BONNER, his former partner, liked to recount the
story of a female officer from outside the district who arrived
dressed in a leather outfit.
"I just love a woman when she dresses in leather," remarked Mr.
FREEMAN.
"What do you mean by that?" she asked.
"Well, you smell like a new car."
During the early years in surveillance, Mr.
FREEMAN became especially
close to his team, since the unit's six or seven members worked
the same hours. They spent off-time together, sometimes becoming
close enough to share Christmas holidays or vacation trips. It
wasn't easy work and could be dangerous, investigating organized
crime, auto theft and motorcycle gangs. After only a couple of
years, Mr.
FREEMAN was promoted to detective and took over running
his team.
Everyone in the unit knew they had to pull their weight to meet
his expectations. Mr.
FREEMAN saw hard work as simply keeping
up the standards he felt every officer should share - in the
work, the uniform or even the vehicle they drove. As detective,
most of his work should have been focused behind the desk or
in administrative duties, but he could often be seen hopping
in a car with colleagues and chasing after criminals.
During this time, he separated from and then divorced his wife.
Later, he met Daneen
RAE, a fellow police officer. The two became
close and moved in together. In the mid-1980s, Ms.
RAE was diagnosed
with leukemia and given just three months to live. He stuck with
her and she fought on for more than three years before dying
in 1988. Not long afterward, Mr.
FREEMAN transferred out of the
special sections unit.
In April of 1994, he unexpectedly experienced a change in his
social life that would set the course for years to come. At 42,
he met the love of his life on a blind date set up by one of
her Friends. Craig
FREEMAN and Doctor Carol
ROLHEISER made an unusual
couple: She was an associated dean at the Ontario Institute of
Studies in Education, while he was deep in the subculture of
law enforcement.
In 1997, they married. But while honeymooning in San Francisco,
Mr. FREEMAN began having problems with pain in his feet. When
he returned to work, he began a quest to find out what on earth
was troubling him. Over the next couple of years, he tried to
figure out the cause, but he and his doctors remained puzzled.
When he was finally hospitalized because of a blood clot, doctors
suggested amputating his legs. That struck him as a ridiculous
notion.
Dr. ROLHEISER called in some favours through her university network
and the couple found a doctor who finally solved the mystery.
Three years in, Mr.
FREEMAN found out he was suffering from POEMS
syndrome, a very rare blood disorder with no real explanation
that doctors believe may involve an overgrowth of bone-marrow
cells. Its unusual acronym is made up from elements of its most
common symptoms: Polyneuropathy (peripheral nerve damage); organomegaly
(abnormal enlargement of organs); endocrinopathy (damage to hormone-producing
glands)/Edema; M protein (an abnormal antibody); and skin abnormalities.
In the end, doctors had to amputate one leg below the knee. For
the next seven years, Mr.
FREEMAN maintained a positive attitude
and acquired all the gadgets necessary to outfit a van in a way
that would allow him to motor on. Although he technically semi-retired
in 1999, he remained a member of the police force and delighted
in finding his Friends gifts on the Internet. Sometimes, colleagues
would open the door to discover a new kitchen gadget or even,
since he was the "world's biggest Jimmy Buffet fan," the latest
margarita machine.
This year, with his health deteriorating, Mr.
FREEMAN drove himself
to his official retirement ceremony, but fell very ill in August.
In hospital, he charmed the staff with his attitude. Even in
his last days, his humour was not to be messed with.
"Do you know you are in Toronto General Hospital?" asked Doctor
ROLHEISER,
testing his cognition.
"Well, I'm not in Kansas City," he replied.
John Craig
FREEMAN was born in Toronto on July 6, 1952. He died
at Toronto General Hospital on August 19, 2007. He was 55. He
is survived by his wife, Carol
ROLHEISER, and his brother, Mark
FREEMAN. He also leaves many others in his extended family.
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