Questions remain in murder of Mac student Tyler Johnson

It’s been six weeks since 30-year-old McMaster student Tyler Johnson was shot and killed near Hess Village. And yet despite the elapsed time, the big questions of responsibility and motive remain largely unknown.

The fourth-year mechanical engineer’s bright future was stolen from him in the early hours of the morning on Saturday, Nov. 30, 2013. At approximately 3 a.m., Johnson was involved in an incident between two groups of men outside of Vida La Pita restaurant near the corner of King Street West and Caroline Street, one block east of Hamilton’s popular bar district, Hess Village.

Hamilton police sergeant Paul Hamilton said that the conflict occurring between the two groups “quickly escalated when one man produced a handgun and shot the victim.”

Johnson’s body was found in the nearby Tim Hortons parking lot and was pronounced dead at Hamilton General Hospital. Initially, emergency responders thought Johnson had been stabbed and began trying to treat him for stab wounds before realizing that he had been fatally shot in the chest.

One arrest was made in the weeks following Johnson’s death. Brandon Barreira, a 19-year-old Hamiltonian was arrested in Cambridge on Dec. 11 with a first-degree murder charge. He has since made brief procedural court appearances via video remand to set later appearance dates. His next appearance is scheduled for Thursday, Jan. 9.

Police are still seeking several suspects and persons of interests following the release of surveillance videos last month. The videos, taken from Tim Hortons and Vida La Pita surveillance footage and posted on the Hamilton Police YouTube channel, are an appeal to the public to identify six different men who were possibly involved in or were witness to Johnson’s shooting.

Despite posting the videos, police have yet to make any further arrests. Anyone with further information is asked to contact the Hamilton homicide unit at 905-546-4123 or to call Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-8477.

Johnson was the second homicide in a two-month period for that particular parking lot on King Street West. On Sept. 15, 2013, David Pereira, 18, was stabbed to death at 2:30 a.m. Raleigh Stubbs, 49, was charged with his murder.

Since Johnson’s violent passing, accounts of his good nature and determination to become an engineer have been shared with the media. Sessional instructor Joel Hilchey taught Johnson last term in the fourth-year class Engineering & Social Responsibility. In a class where “the goal is to reinforce that being a good engineer involves being a good person as well,” Johnson seems to have embodied that manifesto.

“The week before he died, he talked to me after class [to] challenge one of his grades on an assignment,” Hilchey shared. “The class in general did pretty poorly on the assignment although Tyler did very well. I was crowded with a group of people after class as I often am but … he waited patiently and I looked at his paper and said, ‘you should go challenge this – I think it was graded too harshly’ and he said, ‘thanks a lot, I really appreciate it,’ and took off after that.”

Hilchey said that what struck him most about Johnson was that, “In a conversation about challenging a grade where lots of students are regularly hostile, he really wasn’t. He was nothing but respectful.”

A regular attendee of the class, Hilchey said that Johnson “did good work on his assignments and I can tell he was putting a lot of thought into them.” Johnson had also recently been accepted to complete his masters at McMaster next fall.

One particular class assignment to create a TED talk sharing one’s wisdom with the world resulted in a video that Johnson posted on YouTube on Nov. 10. Titled “Decisions we make and the impact they can have on society,” the video has been shared and discussed frequently since his death and has accumulated nearly 4000 views.

“It may be poetic, or maybe it’s just a coincidence that Tyler talked about the long term impact of our decisions,” Hilchey said, echoing the opinion of many viewers after watching three-and-a-half minute piece.

“One of my educational goals is to help students think about more than just the strict ‘mathematical’ definition of engineering,” Hilchey continued. “I want people to be good people and from what I can tell, Tyler was committed to that. He was committed to developing himself, bettering himself and bettering the world.”

Grief counseling continues to be offered to students at the Student Wellness Centre in McMaster University Student Centre room B101. Appointments can be made at the Centre or by calling 905-525-9140 x27700.