TORONTO

A TTC ride home nearly two weeks ago left Brandon Van Dinther painted as the poster child for Islamophobia in Toronto, his very life threatened.

Van Dinther and two friends reportedly lashed out at two Muslim women on a Bloor subway car, a brief but ugly encounter that would be broadly characterized — in the wake of the Paris terror attacks that saw 130 killed by Muslim extremists — as a shameful example of Canadian Islamophobia.

The teen met with and apologized to both women last week for his role in the exchange, but insisted in an interview with the Toronto Sun that misunderstanding and anger, not racism, fuelled the encounter.

Things escalated when Van Dinther, who is mixed race with a black mom and a white father, and his friend, who is black, heard the Muslim women accuse them of “behaving like monkeys” and believed the women were making a racial slur against them.

The 16-year-old, through the intervention of Toronto Police, met with both Muslim women and apologized for his role in the altercation.

“Some people can take it the way they want, but at the end of the day, I know I’m apologizing straight out of my heart to these two women,” Van Dinther said. “I’m sorry that me and them had to go off on the wrong way — that it couldn’t have been solved right then and there.”

THE ALLEGATIONS

It is difficult to offer a completely clear picture of what happened on that subway train Nov. 18 — Van Dinther’s other friends and the Muslim women wouldn’t speak to media, nor would police elaborate beyond saying no charges would be laid and the TTC has no audio recording of any part of the encounter.

But shortly after the incident occurred, TTC spokesman Brad Ross said two women wearing hijabs on the eastbound train, between Yonge and Sherbourne stations, were “doing nothing but minding their own business” when two men and a woman began taunting them.

Witnesses on the train reported that one of the three kids referred to the Muslim women as terrorists and suggested they were going to blow up the train.

“They were making racist comments towards these women, suggesting they must be terrorists and were going to blow up the train,” Ross said.

“These three cowards fled the station,” he added.

The story went viral as another example of Muslim backlash, likened to the fire set deliberately at a mosque in Peterborough and now being investigated as a hate crime. This story was also widely picked up by social media, politicians — including Toronto Mayor John Tory, and foreign press.

The only problem, according to Van Dinther, is what actually happened didn’t get reported.

ANOTHER SIDE

Van Dinther, his girlfriend and a buddy boarded a crowded eastbound train around 6 p.m. Nov. 18 at the Yonge subway station.

As he entered the car, he felt the sharp pain of someone behind him stepping on the heel of his new white Nike Air Force 1 sneakers.

Annoyed, he spun around and glared at the offender — a woman in her 20s wearing a hijab.

He expected an apology, but instead said she responded with what he took as a rude remark.

“What?” she said.

His immediate reaction was to respond in kind — “Your breath stinks,” he said.

When the women took offence and began scolding him, Van Dinther’s friend turned up the volume of Adele’s “Hello” pumping out of his portable Soundpebble speaker.

RACIST REMARK?

Then came a remark the teens took as racist.

“They were saying we were behaving like monkeys and my friend took offence to that because he’s black, too,” Van Dinther said.

“My friend said, ‘Excuse me? I have a Canadian citizenship. Don’t call me a monkey, I can play music wherever I want’... They were racist before we started arguing.”

As the train continued to the next stop, people were shoulder-to-shoulder and tempers flared.

Van Dinther, who wore a gold grill on his teeth, a Michael Kors watch, jeans and a black parka that day, said one of the Muslim women began pointing her finger in his girlfriend’s face. His girlfriend swatted the finger away and warned: “If you guys aren’t going to be quiet, they’re not going to be quiet. So why don’t you guys just shut up.”

Their voices rose to shouts and with all eyes on the packed train on the confrontation, Van Dinther noticed in the window reflection a passenger hit the yellow emergency strip.

He said he turned to his girlfriend, who was in the middle of the heated fight with the two Muslim women, and said aloud, “If you press the emergency button, they’re going to think it’s a bomb.”

Then the train halted at Sherbourne station and, according to Van Dinther, he and his friends were questioned by two TTC operators and then told them to leave the station after the Muslim women declined to call police. They were told they wouldn’t be allowed back on that train.

THE AFTERMATH

The allegations of racial slurs and assault came from the two Muslim women and another witness.

According to a CTV interview, a passenger said he heard the suspects tell the women to “go back where (they) came from.”

Van Dinther insists he never said nor heard that.

Toronto Police initially released — then subsequently removed — his photo from their Twitter account after it was revealed he was a minor.

The Grade 11 student at a Scarborough school said he received death threats from fellow classmates on social media, including an Instagram picture of a 9-mm Glock with a threatening note.

“It had three bullets,” he said. “It said two of them are going to be in your head.”

When the threats began pouring in, Van Dinther approached his mother and told her he had been involved in the subway episode. He went to 41 division on Nov. 21, three days after the incident. In the days ahead, he made the decision to organize a face-to-face apology to the two Muslim women, mediated by two police officers.

I’M NOT RACIST

Sitting at the dinner table at his parents’ two-bedroom apartment, wearing a blue and yellow basketball jersey of a local public elementary school he once attended, the teen explained his side of the subway incident.

“I never made a racist comment,” Van Dinther said. “I have Muslim friends myself and I go to a school full of Muslim people, so I would never make a comment that’s plain rude ... people think I’m a racist and I’m not a good person.”

In late May, when Van Dinther was 15, he took off with his girlfriend, a street kid — the same one he was with on the subway car, for 45 days to live on the street. No one knew where he disappeared to, only to have him return home in July. His father checked him into rehab for marijuana addiction.

Diagnosed with attention deficit disorder, Van Dinther struggled with school.

In July, after he returned home, his aunt organized a $5,000 crowdfunding campaign for the boy “who is experiencing extreme bouts of depression and confusion,” according to the cached GoFundMe page.

His father, Willy, is white, of Dutch descent, and his mother, Jasmine, is black, born in British Columbia and of Anguillan and Barbadian background. They’re both hard-working parents, spending hours on an assembly line and filling health-care orders from a Shoppers Drug Mart, respectively.

“I believe 95% of his story is accurate,” Willy, 58, insisted. “I don’t know if his friend said something he didn’t hear. I’ve asked him numerous times. I have to take him for his word because he is coming forward to say sorry.”

Van Dinther’s mom suggested the story “was blown up” by the media because of the Paris attacks.

“It’s been very one-sided and misconstrued,” she said. “People don’t truly understand what’s happened. But it wasn’t racist, it wasn’t a hate crime. It was a kid who, unfortunately, sometimes doesn’t know when to be quiet.”

THE APOLOGY

During the meeting with the two Muslim sisters, the women told Van Dinther they didn’t recall uttering the word “monkeys” and didn’t apologize for that comment.

“They said they could’ve said it, but they don’t recall saying it,” the teen said. “I feel kind of disrespected that they just see me as a young kid and they don’t have to say sorry for what they did.

“We shook hands at the end.”

They did accept Van Dinther’s apology and both sides considered the meeting had ended on “an amicable” note, Willy said.

“They basically told Brandon, ‘You’ve got to watch what you’re saying, especially in these times,’” he said.

jenny.yuen@sunmedia.ca