On consecutive nights this week, a man and woman were fatally shot.

Both had their backs turned to the gunmen. Both were innocent victims.

Neither was implicated in the crimes unfolding around them on opposite sides of the city: a neighbourhood war, and the slaying of an alleged gang member.

Ruma Amar, 29, was shot in the back of the head as she and her husband and sister were leaving a North York bowling alley last Saturday. Two suspects had rained gunfire in what police say is a targeted shooting of another man, who was pronounced dead at the scene.

In Etobicoke the night before, Nnamdi Ogba was approached from behind by assailants in what police are characterizing as a neighbourhood retaliation that led to the death of “an innocent man.” The 26-year-old was not even a resident of the Scarlettwood Ct. neighbourhood he was visiting last Friday.

Shootings account for over half of city homicides. It’s unclear how many innocent people have been the victims of targeted shootings, but there have been at least 12 bystanders killed by errant bullets in Toronto in the last decade alone.

“We always assume that the person who gets shot was implicated somehow in a crime,” said Jooyoung Lee, an associate professor at the University of Toronto. He added that crossfire “is part of the gun violence narrative we don’t hear enough about.”

Toronto Police homicide Det. Sgt. Gary Giroux was the lead on two crossfire cases. A challenge for investigators handling cases of innocent shooting victims is offering an explanation to families, in some cases when a motive for the shooting is undetermined, he said.

“I try to get them to wrap their head around something like having lost a family member under those circumstances … something so senseless, and so preventable, and unnecessary and all those other adjectives that you want to use, but it’s difficult to come up with an explanation,” the veteran investigator said.

This was the case for Bailey Zaveda, a young woman shot outside a bustling Duke of York tavern in 2008. Her case was solved. Zaveda’s killer, Kyle Weese, was convicted in 2011 of second-degree murder in a shooting that injured four other people, not including the shooter’s intended target.

But the homicide of Derek Wah Yan is still an open case. He was killed when a bullet tore through his house as he was putting his young son to bed in 2003.

“Where would one want to feel more safe than in their own home, putting their son to bed?” Giroux said, adding he makes a yearly appeal to the public on this unsolved case.

Giroux believes a bullet fired from street level passed through the wall of Wah Yan’s house, a large portable radio, and ultimately killed a man remembered as a devoted father of two.

Wah Yan’s youngest son was downstairs the night tragedy struck the family.

Though Felix Yan was not old enough to fully grasp what was going on around him, he instantly understood that gun violence “was bad, obviously because of what happened and what it had taken away from me.”

“It’s something that time and again we would discuss, like how would life be different, how would we be living if my father was still around,” he said of his older brother, Andrew, and mother.

His tight-knit family has worked to move on from the anger, but grief and weariness can sometimes peek through, the 22-year-old chemical engineering student said. For instance, walking in a safe neighbourhood at night or being out too late tends to evoke questions of personal safety more than they otherwise should, Felix Yan said.

Even speaking to the Star was a decision he made with some hesitation. Felix Yan elected not to go over the painful details of that night, but said it’s important for victims of gun violence to talk to someone.

“It’s good to talk about these things. It’s not good to take all your emotions and bottle it inside,” he said.

South of the border, the carnage from gun violence in mass shootings, including a school shooting in Florida, has spurred local community activists to hold a solidarity march on Saturday, beginning at Toronto City Hall.

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In the shootings this past week, police said Ogba was leaving the home of friends who live in a Scarlettwood Ct. complex when he was ambushed by two hooded men who had followed him at a distance before the shooting. They fled in an SUV.

“I ask that you look into your heart at this particular situation. This situation was not one gang member shooting another. It’s an innocent man being gunned down walking to his car, going to see his fiancée,” a homicide investigator told reporters Monday.

“I believe that these suspects may harbour some kind of animosity towards the neighbourhood of Scarlettwood Ct., and those residents who reside in it,” said Det. Jason Shankaran.

Amar was married to Amandeep Luthra one year ago this month. The young couple was looking at baby cradles the morning of her death.

“All I know is the next moment I was just trying to hold her, and she was bleeding so bad,” her husband told the Star Monday.

Police say the intended intended target was 32-year-old Thanh Tien Ngo. Ngo is an alleged member of the Chin Pac, police documents show, a gang in years-long rivalry with the Asian Assassinz. Police have not indicated that Saturday’s shooting is gang-related.

University of Toronto professor Lee has ventured to gangland grounds – from south central Bloods and Crips territory in L.A. to the streets of Philadelphia — as part of his research on gun violence.

“Once you start to squeeze that trigger and fire projectiles into a crowd or into a public place, any number of things can happen,” he said, recounting the horrific tale of a ricochet bullet victim in Philadelphia, who was at a stoplight when gunmen opened fire on the street. A bullet ricocheted off a building and pierced the trunk of her car, then the car seat, then her stomach. She survived.

Reminders of these bullets are sometimes carved in the neighbourhood, through dents and marks in concrete, or piercings in building walls.

But it’s the scars below the surface that continue to haunt communities.

“I know of families within the community where I work, where young people are absolutely traumatized by the sounds of guns at night,” said Donna Harrow, chair of the African-Canadian Coalition of Community Organization.

She has met with mothers who have lost sons to gun violence, with one woman who has to make the daily walk past the same corridor in her social housing unit where her son was killed.

“I think that it’s not as simple as gangs. It goes much deeper than that … . Because young people don’t just wake up in the morning and decide to pick up a gun.”