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TORONTO — So there’s this arc that happens sometimes with a crime where, no matter how serious it is, in the immediate aftermath, it feels like a joke. It’s an instinct maybe — the one where dark comedy comes from, and gross-out comedy — that instinct to, upon hearing something awful, just laugh.

On Tuesday, walking out of Robarts Library at the University of Toronto, Stevie He indulged that instinct, just for a moment. “It’s kind of funny,” the life sciences student said, chuckling. “I think most people think of it as a … joke.”

It’s only when you stop and really focus on the details, when you picture the victim and imagine, for a moment, that it might have been you, that the actual horror sets in. He laughed. But he added, quickly, that his roommate is afraid to go outside. As for himself, “even now I stay away from high buildings,” he said, “because I’m afraid someone will dump”— he gestured — “you know.”

At this point, it’s unlikely there’s anyone in the city, or anywhere else in Canada, that doesn’t know what he was talking about.

It was feces. But we don’t know if it is, in fact, human feces

On Monday night, a man dumped a bucket of what police believe was liquefied waste — whether animal or human they aren’t yet sure — on a woman just after she left a U of T building on the south edge of campus. It was the third feces attack on a Toronto campus in four days, all pulled off, police believe, by the same man.

The attacks have left the city’s thousands of university students — many already hepped up on exam stress and winter blues — poised somewhere between fear, shock and dark hilarity. With the attacker still on the loose, meanwhile, many are worried they could be next.