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That was just before midnight on July 4. By just after midnight, he was dead. In a wild bloody span that lasted seconds, a police officer called to the scene shot Loku twice. He was 45 years old. He had five children. He died in a hallway. There’s a candle there now, marking the spot where he fell.

Loku’s death — the death of a black man with a history of mental illness at the hands of the police — has touched off a furious debate in Toronto. It came within a year of Mike Brown’s death in Ferguson, Missouri and the police killing of Eric Garner in New York City. And it happened in Toronto, a city already embroiled in its own toxic fight over race and policing.

On Thursday, the activist group Black Lives Matter-Toronto occupied a meeting of the Toronto Police Services Board. They demanded the mayor and the police chief apologize for Loku’s shooting. “Every single day, black bodies in this city face violence,” said the group’s co-founder, Rodney Diverlus. “Whether it’s carding, whether it’s surveillance, whether it’s physical violence, and whether it’s death. This is life and death for us.”

But Loku’s killing was more than just an anecdote in a larger trend. It was singular, too — a period jabbed into a sentence not yet half done. In interviews, witnesses, friends and family members paint a remarkable portrait of his life. But his death is still a fog, a mystery of conflicting accounts. Fundamental questions about the entire incident remain. Where was the hammer when Loku was shot? Could the police have talked him down? Did they even try? Robin Hicks, the last non-police officer to see him alive, for one, doesn’t think they did enough. “I don’t even know if Andrew even had time to drop the hammer,” she said. “I really don’t. Everything just happened so fast.”