Shooting of Edmond Yu
1997 police killing of a mentally ill man in Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Edmond Wai-Hong Yu (余偉康; October 2, 1961 – February 20, 1997) was a Hong Kong Canadian former medical student whose death after being shot by a constable of the Toronto Police Service sparked debates about the police's use of force, mental illness, and the treatment of those diagnosed with a mental illness and struggle with homelessness.
Early life and mental illness
Yu was raised in Hong Kong and immigrated to Canada in 1982. While young, Edmond won the Hong Kong city boxing championship. He attended York University from 1982 to 1984, studying pre-medicine. In 1984 he was accepted as a medical student at the University of Toronto.
In 1985, police arrested Yu and took him to the Clark Institute of Psychiatry, where he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and later on became homeless.
Death
On February 20, 1997, Yu assaulted a woman at a bus stop, then boarded a bus. Police attempted to board the bus, at which point Yu, according to witnesses, raised a small hammer. Constable Lou Pasquino fired six shots, hitting Yu three times.
An official inquest in 1998–1999 cleared the police of wrongdoing and resulted in a number of recommendations.
The public source identifies “Shooting of Edmond Yu” as 1997 police killing of a mentally ill man in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Shooting, Edmond and police.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5338937. Authority coordinates are 43.638, -79.392. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1961, 1997, 1982 and 1984.
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This entry incorporates text from “Shooting of Edmond Yu” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.