The mother of a 17-year-old boy struck and killed by gunfire during a shooting in a Malton parkette last weekend that left four other children and one woman injured laments that she and her other son couldn’t stop his bleeding and save his life.

Raechon Elahie says the parkette behind her apartment building, in the Morning Star and Goreway drives area, was teeming with children and others last Saturday evening, and her son Jonathan Davis and his elder brother were just grabbing an ice cream after spending the afternoon shopping.

Elahie says her sons had a car parked nearby, and Davis should have been inside the car at the time of the incident, but he had gotten out and was walking towards his home to change his shoes at his mother’s house.

At about 6:30 p.m., as many as seven people wearing masks and carrying semi-automatic handguns approached.

They opened fire as Elahie brought her younger daughter in from their playing on their patio.

“And I just heard ‘pop, pop, pop, pop’. But I didn’t pay no mind, was this fireworks, I was just looking up . . . and all the sudden I heard everyone screaming and running in every direction.”

The suspects sprayed more than 100 rounds into the parkette. Investigators say they were aiming at a group filming a rap video nearby but the rounds went everywhere, striking a 13-year-old girl, a 16-year-old boy, two 17-year-old boys and a woman in her 50s.

Elahie said her eldest son called out to her as she was looking outside, trying to figure out what was going on.

“And I just saw my oldest get up wherever he was and get in the car and drive off for two seconds – and then he drove back around, and he yelled ‘mom Jonathan is not in the car, Jonathan is not in the car.’”

She sprinted outside barefoot to search for Jonathan. Soon she spotted a group crowded around something on the ground.

“I saw a bunch of people crowding a body – they’re standing there and I just made him out from his pants and the slippers on his feet,” she said.

She said she got down to him and lifted him off the ground.

“There was blood coming out of his mouth, there was blood coming out of his nose,” she said, struggling with tears.

She said she wiped blood from his face, and then pressed a wound with her hand on top of his, and then later called a close friend when paramedics arrived to take over.

“Nobody was telling me anything… if they could find a pulse or anything,” she said.

Without saying anything to her, Elahie said the paramedics eventually stopped trying to revive him.

“They just put a bag over him – nobody told me sorry. Nobody said he didn’t make it. They just put a bag over him.”

The coroner later told her that her son was struck in the heart and died nearly instantly.

She said since Saturday, she’s had trouble not blaming herself for the loss of her son, a boy she said was mild-mannered but polite, hard-working and easy going.

“I play it in my head over and over.”

Since his death, Elahie says Jonathan’s younger sister runs over to his room and calls for him, not wanting to accept he is gone.

Interim Peel Regional Police Chief Chris McCord said Sunday that the perpetrators were motivated by a rap video filmed in the same parkette earlier this month that challenged “other people within the community.”

Jonathan Davis attended Lincoln Alexander Secondary School and was in Grade 12.

His father, Linton Davis, echoed his son’s mother, saying Jonathan was kind and loving and good natured.

“He was a very good son – I will miss him to my grave,” he told CP24.

Both Jonathan’s parents say they cannot understand why anyone, let alone a pack of several people, could walk into that parkette and open fire.

“Obviously they prepared they had masks and all of these weapons but then you enter your environment and you see the surroundings,” Elahie said. “You see unnecessary people, you see little kids. The people you were coming to, they weren’t alone. Don’t tell me they were in their right mind.”

Jonathan’s father said the act would haunt whoever pulled the trigger.

“I don’t know how to describe these guys. I don’t know if by killing someone they’re feeling more like a man, or a monster.”