Shammal Ramsey, the 18-year-old shot dead beside a northeast Toronto high school Wednesday morning, was a student with intellectual disabilities at a high school for people with special needs — and police say they don’t know why someone would have wanted to kill him.
Maplewood High School serves “some of the neediest students in the system,” said regional superintendent of schools Al Wolch, including students with a broad range of intellectual disabilities, physical disabilities and autism.
Wolch and school administrators would not describe Ramsey’s disabilities. But Wolch said many of the school’s 300 students can be “very, very vulnerable.”
“People who don’t understand the kids make the assumption that they’re operating at a level that far exceeds the level they’re really operating on,” he said.
