The mother of a young Toronto woman killed in a pre-dawn hit-and-run made a tearful appeal for information Monday.
“She’s never going to come back, but the least someone can do for me, help me find the people that did this to my baby,” Valerie Davis said in an interview with CTV Toronto from her east Toronto apartment. “Have a little compassion. Show some love. Show some heart. Just do something. Do the right thing.”
Brandy Kashana Reid, 21, was on Danforth Rd., just south of St. Clair Ave., when she was struck by what police believe to be a light-coloured minivan just before 3 a.m. Friday. She was steps away from the apartment she shared with her girlfriend, her “best friend,” Dahlia Duncan-Busby.
“To the world, she’s going to be an unknown, young, 21, female, on the street, pedestrian. She’s not that to me. She’s Brandy. Brandy Kashana Reid. Brandy Kashana Reid,” Davis said. “She’s my baby, my baby. I need help, please. Please, I need help, anybody, anybody, please, please.”
Security camera images from the moments before Reid was killed showed her crossing Danforth Road from the east side to the west side. Before making it across the street, she appears to be lying on the pavement. It is unclear how she came to be there — whether she had tripped or collapsed, or whether there was some other explanation — but her family said they are certain she would not have been there willingly.
“We don’t know anything and I think for me, that is the hardest part of my grief right now,” said her older sister, Paula Reid. “We’re tired of the maybes. And the only people who can fill in the gaps are the people who were behind the wheel.”
Brandy Reid was the youngest of four children. According to her family, she was an ambitious woman whose presence “demanded attention,” who adored her nieces and nephews and who dreamed of becoming a firefighter.
“She was my baby. Somebody took my baby Brandy away from me. I don’t know who did it, but somebody must know something,” her mother said. “Right now, I can’t smile no more. I can’t eat. I can’t sleep. I can’t do anything. I’m beside myself.”
This is the second time in a year that Reid’s family has lost someone on the roads.
According to her family, in July 2015, her 23-year-old cousin, Keffash Davis, was killed in a motorcycle collision in Hamilton.
“They were very, very close,” Davis said. “Brandy did not even recover from what happened to Keffash.”
Funeral arrangements are being made for July.
“I always thought that it would just follow a natural course that, God forbid, one day way down the line, we would have to bury our parents,” Paula Reid said. “And then we would, in order, have to bury each other. I never, ever expected to outlive my baby sister.”
She appealed for the driver of the minivan to call police.
“Either to say, ‘I didn’t see, it was dark, it was night, it was this, it was that, she was here, she was there, I don’t know anything,'” Paula Reid said. “If you think you know something, we’re asking you to get in touch. If you drove your vehicle and there was something weird about it that wasn’t there before. Any information. We’re not trying to get anybody in trouble. There’s no blame to be laid because we don’t know what happened.”
Investigators say they are still trying to determine the make and model of the minivan that struck Reid. Anyone with information is asked to call Toronto Police Traffic Services at 416-808-1900 or Crime Stoppers.
An online fundraising page has been set up to help the family with funeral expenses.