A Mississauga teen was killed by a large truck in the aftermath of Toronto's Caribbean festival while onlookers watched in horror, raising new questions about the safety of the popular event.

The weekend accident cast a pall on the festivities, commonly called Caribana, which had wrapped up its main parade shortly before. The large tractor-trailer was headed away from the parade route but still loaded with revellers when someone fell off.

"We are deeply saddened by this loss," festival CEO Denise Herrera-Jackson said. "The Toronto police are conducting a full and thorough investigation and we will assist them in any way we can."

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Organizers of the Toronto event had little information to release about the victim. According to police, he was an 18-year-old named Rueshad Grant.

Although the investigation is still in its early stages, with police urging witnesses Sunday to come forward, the accident has brought back memories of a parade death in Montreal three years ago. In that case, a young man was hit after attempting to jump from a truck in the St. Patrick's Day parade.

In the Toronto incident, police said that a young man somehow came off a vehicle that had served as a parade float. It was not immediately clear if he was a performer or someone who took it upon himself to climb onto the vehicle. Police were called shortly before 9 p.m. Saturday night and found a severely injured male. He had been hit by the same vehicle that he had been on and died in hospital.

Stephen Weir, a spokesman for the event, known properly as the Scotiabank Toronto Caribbean Carnival, said that the truck had passed the review stand of the Grand Parade earlier in the evening and was "inching" along Lake Shore Boulevard West. This was a very congested stretch of road, he said, with the traffic "stop more than go" as vehicles moved toward an area where their passengers would be able to disembark.

An unsubstantiated video posted on YouTube appears to show the surrounding crowd shouting at the driver of a slow-moving vehicle to stop.

"If the video is in fact of the float involved, there's got to be thousands of people all around that float," police Sergeant Lawrence Zimmerman said. "We're just hoping that if someone actually saw what happened, they would contact us."

The footage was being examined as part of the investigation.

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Police also said they had spoken to the driver of the float involved and were working Sunday on a "reconstructive investigation" in an attempt to figure out just what had happened.