THE UNKNOWN DEAD

These people died violently, suddenly. Why are authorities keeping their names secret?

- WENDY GILLIS AND JENNIFER PAGLIARO

A man, who walked into a North York office building and killed two people before turning the weapon on himself.

A woman, found dead outside her Sault Ste. Marie home, fatally strangled by her husband.

A man, shot dead by a Toronto police officer outside a Scarborough medical building.

These recent, deaths incidents have left pressing questions in their wake about what happened, and whether anything could have been done to prevent it. Yet in all three cases, authorities have withheld a fundamental piece of information about those who died: their names.

The cases are troubling examples, critics say, of a creeping trend to withhold critical information about people who die violent deaths pitting personal privacy considerations against the greater public interest of knowing who is killed in our communities, and by whom.

And at a time when cellphones and social media put seemingly endless information at our fingertips, the shroud of secrecy over a deadly event where we live-blocking information that can affect a community's sense of safety, or prompt social change seems, some argue, all the more backwards.

"This is a public system of justice, and when someone commits a crime, they've committed a crime against society," says Lisa Taylor, a senior fellow at the Centre for Free Expression, a non-partisan organization based out of Toronto Metropolitan University that promotes human rights to expression, including the right to know.

"So we do get to know who people are. We should get to know who people are. And there are really important public policy reasons."