1. A killing in the North
When the guns fell silent, a man lay dead. Another man riddled with bullets escaped with his life. Two teens fled, but in the small northern Ontario community, they really had nowhere to go.
Ginoogaming First Nation, a remote community of 200 people living in 90 homes, is not the kind of place that usually makes headlines. It is a 68-square-kilometre Anishnawbe reserve, tucked just south of the TransCanada Highway and next door to the tiny lakeside town of Longlac.
The reserve’s profile changed with a hail of bullets in early October. Within hours of the shooting, the community, a 3 ½-hour drive northeast from Thunder Bay, was in lockdown as police launched a search for the two suspects. The incident made national news.
Details of the shooting are still foggy. The Ontario Provincial Police and the local Anishinabek Police Service are not discussing the particulars. The community and the survivor say it was about drug trafficking. But when police arrested the teens — two Black youth from Brampton, Ont., one aged 15, the other 18 — what happened took on a sharper focus.
Ginoogaming had briefly become centre stage for an expanding crime trend that began years ago in the Greater Toronto Area, more than 1,100 kilometres south.
Parents, activists and police all say that for years Black teenagers, sometimes as young as 13, have been going missing in the GTA. But they are not runaways. These boys have been groomed and lured into drug trafficking gangs with promises of money and status.
The adult traffickers use the boys as disposable mules, cash cows and legal shields. Often, they only emerge when police raid squalid drug dens, called trap houses, in communities far from their homes, families and lives.
An investigation by CBC’s the fifth estate has found that these boys, embedded into Ontario cities such as Thunder Bay and Sarnia, are also being sent farther and farther north and embedded into remote First Nations communities where drugs — from fentanyl to cocaine — sell at a higher premium than in the big city.
“We have children who are 14 who are involved in this. You have young teenagers who are involved in this life. You know, there are questions to be asked about how youth become involved in crime,” said Jeremy Pearson, deputy chief of the Thunder Bay Police Service.
The city, he said, is a hub point for moving drugs from the GTA into remote communities further north.
“Is there a draw? Is it a coercion? Is there exploitation? Is there a combination of the three? Something that I say often: ‘It’s possible to be both a victim and a perpetrator.'”
- Watch the full documentary, “Missing Black Boys,” from the fifth estate on YouTube or CBC-TV on Friday at 9 p.m.
For activists raising the alarm about the issue, the answer is clear — these boys are being trafficked as criminal labour. But police say it is not that simple, and laying a trafficking charge requires the boys who end up selling drugs out of town, or “OT,” to testify against their gang leaders — something they rarely do.
O’Shea Stewart, a Toronto-area school counsellor who tries to keep young men out of gangs, knows the consequences for the boys. Four of the boys he has worked with have died after going missing.
“I’ve had the chance to work with kids outside of being Black. And I’ve seen how they get sucked into the life, too,” Stewart said, noting that some Black youth are particularly vulnerable to criminal predators.
“No kid is born a criminal. I think that there’s learned behaviors. There is definitely influence. They are being sucked into a life or forced into a life that they don’t want to be in.”
That influence may come from an adult criminal. But Black boys also face well-known social and economic challenges — from high unemployment to bias within the justice and educational systems — that can make them more vulnerable to the pull of organized crime.
The violence in October that traumatized the reserve community was new, said Ginoogaming Chief Sheri Taylor, but the presence of out-of-town boys selling drugs there is not.
“We’ve been hearing about this type of behaviour and these types of incidents happening in our community. I can’t really pinpoint when. I know it’s been some years,” Taylor said.
“I have a lot of weight here, to keep the community safe, especially our kids. I’m not feeling 100 per cent safe and I can’t guarantee that.”
She declared a state of emergency on the reserve after the shooting, the second time she did so in relation to out-of-town drugs arriving in her community.
The declaration is mostly symbolic, she said, but she hoped it would bring attention — and badly needed help — to her community. She fears for both her own people and the boys smuggled onto the reserve.
“It’s very concerning that they’re getting involved with this at a very, so very young age,” she said. “They’re babies practically. And they are getting involved in a world that has no empathy for people.”
Black teens and parents in the GTA have known about the missing boys for years, but it rarely made headlines. However, some parents didn’t wait for the police or the media to act or for their children to return home on their own. They hit the streets to rescue their children themselves before the boys faced handcuffs or a bullet. And they have a message for the gangs.
“Don’t use my kid to do your dirty work, right? Do it yourself, you’re an adult. I have a message for them: ‘You guys are cowards,'” said a father who lives in Durham Region, whom the fifth estate is calling Marcus to protect the identity of his son who went missing in 2022.
“Using people’s children to do your own dirty work, you want to sell drugs, you want to do this, you’re a man. You know the consequences, you know the laws, you know what it is. Do it yourself.”
Driven by a need for what they think would be a masculine reputation and easy cash, these boys are pulled into a life of crime, said Stewart.
“The more money you make defines how much of a man you are, apparently,” he said. “You see it in social media, right? If you’re not making this amount of money, then you’re a nobody. So, money almost builds confidence.”
But that confidence can blind these impressionable teens to the reality of the life they end up in, said Stewart.
“When it comes to crime, when it comes to being in the streets, it’s a losing game. Nobody’s ever won. It’s either death or in jail.”
A father tells criminals to keep away from his son and young people like him.
2. The signal flare
The phenomenon of Black boys going missing, sometimes called “going OT,” is not new, but has rarely become front page news. However, the traces of what is happening can be found in police media releases and court documents.
There is no hard data to quantify the problem, in large measure because statistics about Black youth are either not collected or, if they are, not routinely made public.
So the fifth estate examined public records of police drug arrests across Ontario going back at least five years to learn more.
That examination found more than a dozen cases that fit an unmistakable pattern: In communities far from the Toronto area, police often arrest one or two adults, along with two or three Black teens from the GTA, in a drug bust.
Among the most high-profile cases was a 2020 joint forces drug crackdown called Project Sunder, which resulted in drug trafficking and weapons charges against members of the Toronto-based Eglinton West Crips (EWC) street gang.
Court documents about the case of the EWC leader, Vito Bailey-Ricketts, known on the street as V-Dizzle, showed the mechanics of how these boys are manipulated and controlled by adult criminals.
The judge in the case wrote that Bailey-Ricketts had “access to a steady supply of youths he could use as mules to bring his drugs north, man his trap houses in Thunder Bay and sell his drugs.”
Those documents show that a 15-year-old Black boy was used by Bailey-Ricketts. The boy was told he was a “soldier” and his primary task was to turn over any money he made to the adult members of the gang and to protect them from the police. If they were busted, the teen was instructed to “hug the charges” — in other words, take the fall for the adults.
In the spring of 2024, Bailey-Ricketts was sentenced to 13 years in prison on a host of drug-related charges, including trafficking fentanyl and cocaine, conspiracy to traffic in association with a criminal organization and instructing a person to commit an indictable offence.
“I think they’re using these kids because of their age, basically. They’re underage. They know that if they get caught with the drugs, it’s not going to be as steep as if it’s an adult,” said Const. Jeff Saunders, who runs the missing persons unit for the police in Thunder Bay.
“I don’t think [the boys] really know what they’re getting into when they come up here.”
While the initial arrests from Project Sunder made splashy headlines across Ontario, details of how the EWC used and manipulated teenaged boys that were revealed during the trial for Bailey-Ricketts did not.
The issue of the missing boys might not have gained more attention were it not for one GTA activist who was concerned about five missing Black boys in 2024. She fired off a signal flare on social media.
“When I saw the images [of the missing boys], I definitely panicked a bit. My heart sank, and I thought, ‘What could be happening?'” said Toronto-based media producer Shana McCalla.
“That could be my son, could be anyone’s son, and why is there nobody talking about this?”
Concerned the boys had not just gone missing but were being forgotten, McCalla launched an Instagram page called “Find Ontario Missing Boys” and focused on the cases of five missing teens. The page is now filled with an array of missing persons posters — each a Black boy.
“People need to be made aware, and people need to be better prepared and protected and know how to protect their kids at the end of the day,” she said.
What spurred McCalla to action was no mirage. Toronto Police Service statistics point directly at the issue. In 2024, for instance, there were 322 male youth reported missing to police. Although Statistics Canada data shows that Black boys make up less than 10 per cent of the city’s population for that age group, of the missing boys, almost half were Black.
Media attention followed McCalla’s Instagram efforts, first from Black-owned news and social media sites. Eventually, major mainstream media outlets began to follow.
But for all the attention, the boys continue to go missing.
Even before McCalla’s efforts went viral online, some parents like Marcus were not waiting around. When his son went OT, he went searching.
He knew something was amiss in 2022 when his 16-year-old son showed up at home with a new cellphone, one Marcus did not buy for him. He learned his son was selling fake phones — something he describes as a gateway to more serious criminal activity.
“This is what I mean by starting somewhere and then elevating these youth up the ladder to do other things,” Marcus said.
Then just before the Easter long weekend that year, his son vanished.
“He was just gone, just a note in his room, that said something along the lines like: ‘Oh, I feel really stressed out and I am going to spend a few days by my friend’s house downtown,'” he said. “I didn’t believe it.”
Marcus enlisted the help of Durham Regional Police, who traced his son’s last cellphone call to Thunder Bay, a city grappling with a serious drug trafficking problem that sometimes erupts into violence.
It was a fate Marcus wanted to avoid for his son, so he and his wife made the 16-hour drive from Durham Region to Thunder Bay to find their boy anyway.
“It’s me playing a cat-and-mouse game. I don’t know what I’m doing and I’m just guessing, see if I see him somewhere if I’m going to find him. There’s no guarantee I’m going to do that before the police do or before something happens to him.”
3. Going OT
The image of going OT is fuelled, in part, by social media. Although the teenage boys are involved in the illegal drug trade, some of them are not shy about showing off their bounty, taking selfies holding stacks of cash and posting them online.
O’Shea Stewart says some boys think unless they are making stacks of cash, they are worthless — an attitude that drives them into the arms of gangs.
The money that can be made at trap houses is considerable, most of it ending up in the pockets of gang leaders. But even boys being used as mules can earn far more than they would at a minimum wage job, said families of teens who went OT that spoke with the fifth estate.
Often learning about opportunities from a friend or even contacted by an adult, these boys can earn $10,000 to $30,000 in a few weeks, these families said. That can be a powerful lure for some teens, especially when the unemployment rate for Black youth in Canada is disproportionately high at 26 per cent, according to Statistics Canada.
“I mean, if you’ve got a 15- or 16-year-old guy that can’t even get a job at a Tim Hortons, can’t get a job anywhere, and he’s being offered $500 a day, that seems like a lot of money for him,” said Jordana Goldlist, a Toronto criminal defence attorney who has represented many boys who end up arrested in trap houses.
Sometimes, she said, the gangs give the boys her number in case they get arrested.
“There’s availability for you to make hundreds of thousands of dollars in this industry. I had a client once who told me that he had traps throughout Sarnia and Windsor and London that were each turning a profit of $80,000 a day.”
The boys are told to pack plastic bags for drugs and rubber bands for cash. They are driven or sent by bus to another city where they will work out of a trap house.
The trap houses are anything but posh. One visited by the fifth estate in Thunder Bay was once a family home, but had become a squalid hovel filled with empty fast-food containers, soiled mattresses and drug paraphernalia.
It is in these conditions that the teens can live and sell drugs.
The fifth estate co-host Mark Kelley visits a trap house in Thunder Bay.
Sometimes the boys are sent home after a time. Other times, said Saunders of the Thunder Bay Police Service, when police and parents come looking, the boys are rejected by their adult handlers.
“When you put the heat on these different areas, the drug dealers, they don’t want that,” he said.
In the one case the fifth estate learned about, a boy was removed from a trap house and dropped off at a police station when his family started knocking on doors in Thunder Bay. The boy ended up going home to Toronto, but Saunders said there is no shortage of replacements.
Trap houses do not advertise, and finding them can be a challenge if one doesn’t know where to look. Even in a community like Ginoogaming, where Black teenagers would stand out, they find ways to stay hidden, said Ginoogaming’s Chief Sheri Taylor.
“They don’t even have vehicles when they’re here so they’re dropped off by somebody.”
Gimoogaming member Martha Taylor saw what was going on because she lives next door to the house where the shooting happened in October.
“I reported, called the cops, took licence plate numbers. Nothing ever happened,” she said. “People going in and out, young kids, like 12, 13, 14 years old.”
For a parent like Marcus, desperately trying to find his son in Thunder Bay, the elusive nature of trap houses was maddening. The boys “know that they can’t be seen outside. They don’t go outside, period,” he said.
“They don’t go to pick food up. They don’t go to restaurants, they don’t travel in Ubers, they don’t take cab rides, they don’t go on the bus, they don’t go outside.”
A person delivering food tipped him off to a trap house location. A young man inside confirmed Marcus’s worst fears. His son had been living there for a week. On a hunch, he went to the bus station, knowing a Toronto-bound bus was leaving soon, and saw his son getting out of a car.
“I walk around the corner. I am like: ‘What’s up?’ He’s like: ‘Dad, I didn’t know you were here.’ I go: ‘What did you think?’ And then he gave me a big hug. “
While his son was safe, who facilitated his going OT remains a question. “That’s what he is not willing to share, no matter how many times I ask him,” said Marcus.
Getting a boy out of a trap house might not just save his life from the violence of the drug trade. It might also keep from walking a path that, once taken, is very hard to leave.
“And that has a lot to do with the individuals that they are associating with. When coming out, and you have a criminal record, that lessens the chance of gaining meaningful employment, ” said Kanika Samuels-Wortley, an associate professor of criminology who studies systemic racism in the justice system at Oshawa’s Ontario Tech University.
A 2022 federal Justice Department report found that Black inmates are more likely to be sentenced to prison sentences than their white counterparts even for the same crime.
Beyond high unemployment, Black youth in Toronto already face challenges their non-Black peers do not.
That 2022 Justice Department report also says over-policing, systemic bias and negative cultural attitudes can shape Black youth in a way that makes them more vulnerable to gangs.
“Being labelled or treated like a criminal, thug or gangster can be internalized by Black youth,” the report says. “This approach to policing creates the sense that there is no reason not to become involved in crime.”
Samuels-Wortley says Black youth are over-represented in Ontario’s prison system, suggesting a problem with anti-Black bias in the justice system, which could play a role in recidivism rates.
However, she said, the Ontario government does not release race-based data about the justice system, making it difficult for researchers like her to study the problem. The more recent data, which does show Black youth are over-represented in the in-custody population, is a decade old.
“I have no reason to believe that situation has improved,” Samuels-Wortley said.
Boys who end up serving time in prison, particularly on serious charges like drug trafficking, seldom return to a normal life, said Samuels-Wortley
“I would say that the chances of a youth being reformed after being in a correctional facility is slim to none.”
4. Exploited but not protected
In early October, Earle Taylor went to the drug house on the Ginoogaming First Nation with a friend to confront the out-of-town dealers. They were selling drugs to his sister, he said, and he wanted them to stop.
“I think it’s not cool for them to come all the way over here to sell their drugs,” he told the fifth estate.
Gunfire was the result. His friend was killed in the house. Taylor took a shotgun blast to the leg, and five bullets to the torso.
After the shooting at Ginoogaming First Nation, Chief Taylor called for a town hall meeting. She said she forbade the news media from attending because she wanted community members to speak freely without fear that they might be identified and face reprisals from whoever is bringing the young boys onto the reserve.
“That is part of the tragedy of it,” she said. “A member of this community has a right to housing and health care and some of them are taking advantage by bringing drugs into our community.”
Taylor and her council have set up a citizens patrol called Peacekeepers on the reserve to report anything suspicious to local police. It is about as much as they do on a reserve with thin resources, where the band council is struggling to provide enough health support to cope with addictions.
“When you’re trying to struggle finding money for all kinds of other things in your community that you need like infrastructure, housing, health and education, mental health and addictions, [security] is just another piece that you need to find funding for and it’s very hard.”
The small Anishnawbe reserve is not alone in dealing with drug traffickers infiltrating its community, and not the only one that has seen the presence of GTA Black boys.
The fifth estate has learned that in the past three years, at least six Black GTA teens have been arrested alongside adults for gun and drug crimes on First Nations reserves in Ontario.
The Anishinabek Police Service, which is tasked with policing and protecting communities like Ginoogaming First Nation, confirmed that drug trafficking from the GTA is a growing issue.
“Since 2021, we’ve conducted over a dozen drug trafficking investigations that resulted in the arrests of persons from the GTA and the seizure of drugs, weapons and cash. The vast majority of the accused in these investigations were male, and many were young offenders or adolescents (16-20 years) at the time of the offence,” said an APS statement to the fifth estate.
Ginamoogaming First Nations chief Sherri Taylor says the reserve needs help to deal with drug trafficking networks infiltrating her northern Ontario community.
5. Criminals or human trafficking victims?
Given that these Black boys are transported so far from home to work in drug houses, parents and activists are asking the same question: Why are the adult criminals not facing human trafficking charges?
This month, McCalla’s Find Ontario Missing Boys Instagram page has been pushing that message, citing international law to say these boys should be treated not as criminals but as trafficking victims.
“When children are treated as criminals, adults remain invisible, exploitation continues, prevention fails, communities stay at risk,” reads a Jan. 14 post. “Public safety depends on seeing the full picture and responding accordingly.”
But police say laying a human trafficking charge in Canada is not as simple as recognizing a teenager in a trap house might be exploited by adults.
“To lay a human trafficking charge, police must have evidence that an adult exercised control, direction or influence over the youth for the purpose of exploitation,” the Toronto Police Service said in a statement to the fifth estate.
“Police cannot infer trafficking solely based on vulnerability or association with criminal activity. A victim’s disclosure is critical in establishing that offence, particularly when it involves youth. We cannot compel a young person to testify or relive traumatic experiences in order to meet a legal threshold.”
Where that disclosure is not forthcoming, police still have an obligation to investigate and lay charges for criminal activity they do find, they said.
Activist Shana McCalla says that adults arrested in drug dens with teenaged boys should be charged with human trafficking, and the boys treated like victims not criminals.
O’Shea Stewart, the school councillor, said Black teenage boys, inculcated with a particularly insidious idea of “manhood,” are unlikely to rat out their bosses.
“They’re very tight-lipped about it. You know the youth, they don’t really talk about it. We hear bits and pieces about what’s going on but it’s ultimately very on the hush,” said Stewart, who told the fifth estate the 15-year-old boy arrested for the Ginoogaming shooting death is one of the students he was working with.
Criminologist Samuels-Wortley said if Canada’s Criminal Code is not allowing police to lay human trafficking changes, then it is time to revisit human trafficking laws. She said the way the Black boys are manipulated is similar to how girls are used in sex trafficking operations.
“In essence we need to reframe gang recruitment so individuals and particularly young racialized persons are seen as a form of trafficking, so it can be something that can be decriminalized and they’re seen as victims and survivors.”
