The 35-year-old man who was shot several times as he led a fitness class in Christie Pits Park on Saturday morning was a former gang leader, police say.
Jose Alejandro Vivar was shot three times in the abdomen while teaching his “Prison Pump” fitness class just before 9 a.m on Saturday.
He was rushed to the hospital and underwent surgery. He is expected to survive.
One of the bullets that passed through Vivar also struck another 20-year-old man in the foot. He is also expected to recover.
Police say witnesses told them the shooter participated in the fitness class for as many as 30 minutes before drawing a gun and firing at Vivar.
Police are now saying that they believe Vivar was targeted, with the victim having past drug and gang ties.
Vivar was arrested in a drug trafficking investigation in 2007 and later convicted — but since he was released from prison in March, he worked hard to turn his life around, according to his lawyer John Struthers.
He started volunteering at a homeless shelter, became a personal trainer and ran a free community fitness class called “Prison Pump,” inspired by a workout routine he taught in prison.
In a cellphone video Vivar took of one of the workouts at Christie Pits Park, he said, “Prison Pump started with one man, and from one man there were 10 guys jogging in the pen, then there was 30, then there was 40. They called me down to administration and thought I was starting a prison gang. I told them, ‘No, it was a workout gang!’”
“He wasn’t hiding, he was in a public place in a public way and as a result it’s a very dangerous and difficult situation for someone who has ever been in a gang to get out,” Struthers told CTV Toronto on Saturday. “It's clear to me in any event that it's some sort of revenge or retaliation for events that took place many years ago.”
Struthers met Vivar when he successfully defended him against a first-degree murder charge in a 2003 shooting outside a Bloor Street café.
“When you’ve been in prison for so long, it’s hard to come out and adapt,” Vivar said in the cellphone video.
The suspect is described as a black male aged 25 to 30. He had a thin build and stood between five-foot-eight and five-foot-nine inches tall. He had short cornrows hanging out of a baseball cap on his head.
He was last seen wearing a black baseball cap, a black hoodie with a white logo in the centre, black sweat pants with a light-colour logo in the left front hip area, and light-coloured running shoes.
He wore dark-coloured sunglasses with gold trim on the arms.
He is still on the loose and investigators are still appealing for witnesses to come forward.
