Death of university student leaves void

In a brutally shortened life, Yosif Al-Hasnawi left his mark. Not what the 19-year-old aspiring doctor had intended. But, of course, the teenager could not have foreseen that he’d bleed out from a bullet in his abdomen, shot after leaving a Hamilton mosque.

- ROSIE DIMANNO

Brock University student Yosif Al-Hasnawi, 19, was fatally shot after trying to stop an elderly man from being harassed outside a Hamilton mosque in 2017. Two paramedics convicted of failing to provide the teen with the necessities of life have been denied a retrial.

So small, the fatal penetrating wound, that a paramedic would later describe it as looking like “a squeezed pimple.”

At Brock University, where AlHasnawi was a first-year medical sciences student, a memorial lecture was founded to address antiracism, for future medical and health professionals. There’s a bursary, too, to which graduates are encouraged to donate. It provides financial aid for students who might not otherwise be able to continue their education.

Al-Hasnawi would have been in the Class of 2021.

But he was killed and none of that future unfolded as his loving family — immigrants from Iraq — had envisioned. So he left behind a hole, an absence, that can never be filled.

The two paramedics who attended to Al-Hasnawi on the evening of Dec. 2, 2017 — badly, without urgency, in such a dereliction of duty that they were both subsequently fired — were convicted of failing to provide the necessaries of life, 18month conditional sentences imposed. Seven-and-a-half years after Al-Hasnawi was slain, the Ontario Court of Appeal has upheld the convictions and the sentences.

In written reasons for the decision released last week, the panel rejected the legal error grounds argued by lawyers for Christopher Marchant and Steven Snively. Simultaneously, the judges also dismissed an appeal by the Crown to have the sentences stiffened.