For more than week, Toronto police ran a missing-person investigation into the disappearance of Ayoub Mohamed. Then, along the shore of Lake Ontario, the body of the six-foot-three former George Brown College basketball player was found in Burlington. An autopsy soon confirmed: the death was suspicious, making this a homicide case.

The same day Mohamed was last seen, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic. By the time the 25-year-old man’s body was found on March 24, Canadians had been told to stay home en masse, borders were closed, and routines and normal practices were upended — including within the Toronto police homicide squad.

Homicide investigator Det. Jason Shankaran set out to meet Mohamed’s grieving family and he soon realized this important interaction was going to be very different from ones he’d had before: it had to be done through masks, at least six feet apart.

“Normally you’d be sitting at a table in a private room. You can bridge that initial human divide that strangers have with each other,” Shankaran said.

“I can only put myself in their shoes to imagine what this must be like to be getting this kind of information from a homicide detective about their son, through distance.”

Throughout the pandemic, Toronto police have reported drops in several major crime categories, including assault, robbery and car theft. But homicides have remained around the record-levels set in recent years; there have now been 22 homicides in the city, higher than the 18 recorded by April 16 in 2019 and 17 in 2018.

“They’re saying calls for service are down,” said Insp. Hank Idsinga, the head of the Toronto police homicide squad. “Not on our end.”

Since March 13, Toronto police have launched ten homicide probes — on average, one every three days and a half days. The most recent came Tuesday morning, when Dr. Paul Morgan, a 79-year-old retired oral surgeon and philanthropist, was found dead inside his North York home with obvious signs of trauma.

As the cases have mounted, investigators have had to pivot to collect evidence safely, protect themselves at scenes and find workarounds for key aspects of any homicide investigation.

“Homicides are not going to stop being investigated because there’s a pandemic going on,” Shankaran said.

One of the first things the unit did was make a dedicated effort to distance themselves from each other. Coincidentally, that was already happening at the outset of COVID-19 crisis.

As trials, including Kalen Schlatter’s first-degree murder case, were wrapping up, some detectives were at court. Meanwhile, recent homicides in various parts of the city meant four of the six homicide teams were working out of the local divisions where they’d occurred, not at police headquarters. This normal practice helped spread out the team, though Idsinga acknowledged that fact could have exposed them to possible infection at other locations.

“Considering that one of the first COVID-positive cases was within headquarters, that worked out timing-wise to be a very good thing,” he said.

Investigators are also now physically distancing themselves when together, holding meetings over Skype and working out of separate offices whenever possible.

“Even with COVID-19 and our team working in different locations, we will not stop investigating,” Shankaran wrote on Twitter recently about his probe into Mohamed’s death, posting a photo of his setup in an empty boardroom, his computer next to Lysol wipes and a bottle of hand sanitizer.

Based on their evidence collected so far, Shankaran said he believes Mohamed was targeted by people who were known to him, adding: “it’s going to be those closest to Ayoub” who help solve the case by bringing information forward.

In general, some gathering of evidence has changed. Surveillance video may be more challenging to obtain because businesses are closed, though Idsinga said there haven’t yet been any problems.

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Witness interviews look different, too. Ideally, the court’s highest standard is to have a witness interviewed under oath on video in a police station. Shankaran said a lot more planning has to go into these kinds of interactions now.

“Cleaning down the room, making sure that the doors are all open, so there’s a direct path for that person to come into a station to go right into the room, sit down, and for you to maintain your distance as an investigator,” he said.

In some cases, doing an interview in the station just hasn’t been possible. Idsinga said interviews have been done over Skype, meaning the statement can’t be taken under oath but will still be recorded. This is done in non-pandemic situations, too — officers have to explain to the court why the witness couldn’t be brought into the station.

“I imagine in a year or two when these cases are coming up to court, you are going to have a lot of officers who are going to say, ‘We were restricted by the pandemic,’” Idsinga said. “I would think that the courts would reasonably understand.”

The unusual circumstances have the potential to affect the interview itself, Shankaran said. If the witness is mistrustful of police — which he acknowledges can often be the case — he says he tried to break down walls by developing a rapport, “but that becomes very difficult when you have to do that from a distance of two metres, with protective gear covering each other.”

“That’s simply a difficulty for us, and it’s something that you have to realize that you have to overcome. So in this case, we have been able to overcome that initial difficulty, but I can’t deny that that isn’t there,” he said.

In general, he knows that he can make people feel more at ease by telling them what to expect; now, he’s trying to ensure he tells those involved in the case about any changes made due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

COVID-19 has brought about at least one simple but valuable change: traffic is way down. Shankaran said that’s sped up the ability to move around and get things done — “it’s just that much better for us.”

Asked if the homicide squad was settling into the new reality, Idsinga said he isn’t sure the COVID-19-related challenges have ceased. So far, the office is still working at normal capacity. Those who had been in self-isolation due to March-break travel are now back at work.

But at some point, he thinks the squad will start losing people to quarantine.

“I think we are well prepared for it and we can hopefully absorb that kind of hit. But I don’t think I would say we are used to it, because I don’t think we are at the lowest point yet.”