While his peers took their seats behind desks for their first day of school on Tuesday, a 14-year-old boy sat behind bars, charged in the shooting death of another teen.

Police have charged the boy with manslaughter after 16-year-old Yusuf Tifow was fatally shot late Sunday in an apartment at 2240 Weston Rd., near Lawrence Ave. W. Tifow later died in hospital.

The accused teen, who cannot be named under the Youth Criminal Justice Act, will appear in court on Wednesday.

Tifow, whose family said they don’t know why he was at the apartment that night, would have also started school Tuesday. So would have six other youth gunned down this year: Tyson Bailey, 15, St. Aubyn Rodney, 15, Jarvis Montaque, 15, Tahj Loor-Walters, 15, O’She Doyles-Whyte, 16, and Kwame Duodu, 15.

Two arrests have been made in those shootings, both youth charged with manslaughter.

In the wake of recent shootings, Toronto police launched Project ICE in three northwest Toronto divisions, where all but one of those youth were killed, to tackle what they called an upswing in gang conflict.

A central question has been whether the recent youth homicides are somehow related to that violence, said Insp. Scott Baptist, who ran the project out of 23 Division, which encompasses Rexdale.

“We’re all trying to figure it out,” he said.

After the project wrapped up Monday, Baptist said police are working on a maintenance plan for the targeted communities to try to keep peace in the wake of several arrests. It will include teams of six uniformed officers and one sergeant in each division, lasting between two and three months.

“We’re trying to maintain what we gained, focusing on different persons of interest, different conflicts,” Baptist said.

It’s not clear if those shootings were anomalies or part of the conflict. But Toronto youth crimes and gangs expert Michael Chettleburgh said the spike in violence highlights a recent shift in incidents from the east end of the city, one that “ebbs and flows.”

In some neighbourhoods, many youth have already spent as much as half their lives wrapped up in gangs by age 14, earning access to weapons, he said.

“The extent to which violence has been normalized in your life by the time you’re 14 — it’s not big deal to pull out a gun and shoot somebody,” Chettleburgh said.

A recent study of more than 400 gang-involved youth conducted by Chettleburgh’s Astwood Strategy Corp. showed one of the biggest risks for youth in joining this violent lifestyle was associating with those already wrapped up in the game.

“It is important where you live in terms of the nature of your peer relationships,” Chettleburgh said, adding not just priority neighbourhoods are at risk but also those in their shadow. He said most of the problem areas correlate with Toronto Community Housing properties.

“They’re gangster factories,” he said. “It’s tough to be a family living in the ’hood and to hope that your kid survives the jungle.”

In the wake of previous shootings, clumped together at the beginning of this year, police swept Toronto Community Housing complexes in eight divisions, netting several guns and other weapons — stuffed in laundry rooms, behind air ducts and ceiling tiles.

Commanders raised concerns over “community guns” shared or rented among several people, making charges and convictions much harder to come by.

A Star series on the gun pipeline between Canada and the U.S. found that of the two to three guns seized by Toronto police every day, more and more are being taken from the hands of kids.

Justice department statistics obtained by the Star show that amid a decline in violent crime, the rate of youth accused of gun crimes in Canada rose nearly 50 per cent between 2002 and 2008.

In February, 23 Division unit commander Supt. Ron Taverner said the majority of guns recovered in the city are linked to youth under 20.

Chief Bill Blair has also expressed concern over the young age of those wielding guns, saying there are “some circumstances where the availability of guns in communities puts those young people at risk.”

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

Chettleburgh said guns in Toronto are readily available to youth who feel they need them, even though a police standard issue Glock 21 that retails at $600 to $700 can go for $2,500 on the street.

He said one young person from the Jane and Finch area once told him: “When you are used to being told you live in a war zone, you begin to act like a soldier.”

Five years ago, the oft-cited report on the roots of youth violence from former attorney general Roy McMurtry and Alvin Curling noted that same reality after community surveys, interviews and research on the issue:

“It takes a certain desperation for a young person to walk our streets with a gun,” the 2008 report said. “The sense of nothing to lose and no way out that roils within such youth creates an ever-present danger.”