Her hands draped around a friend's shoulders, Dawnette Dockery vowed revenge yesterday on the people who killed her husband, taking his life in the living room while their family slept upstairs.

"Tell them I said it's not over," she said. "Ask them why they have to do it. He's a good guy, a hard-working person. They killed my husband for nothing. Nothing."

Dockery returned to her home near Victoria Park Ave. and Eglinton Ave. E. just hours after her husband O'Neil Dockery, 35, was gunned down inside.

Barely able to stand by herself, she shuffled past police tape that still cordoned off four units in her family's townhouse complex. Until this weekend, residents said, it was a peaceful stretch of homes in an otherwise crime-riddled neighbourhood. Shootings are commonplace, they said, in this close-knit, but rough housing project; two years ago a man was killed a couple of streets away.

Neighbours were jolted out of bed around midnight Friday when police cars screeched to a halt before their bedroom windows. Sounds of a woman crying brought them to their doors, residents said, before officers cautioned them a gunman was on the loose and to stay inside.

Dockery was shot around 11:47 p.m., shortly after his wife found him sleeping on the living room couch. She woke him to say goodnight before retiring to bed. She peeked downstairs a few minutes later when she heard arguing, said her husband's brother, Spurgeon Dennis, and she ran back to her room when she realized that a gun was fired.

Dennis, who described his brother as pleasant and quiet, found out about the shooting early yesterday morning. A cousin called to tell him his brother was dead.

"I couldn't believe it," he said. "He's my younger brother."

Dennis said O'Neil Dockery, one of eight children and originally from Jamaica, was a loving father to his 18-month-old daughter Channelle and a good step-parent to Dawnette's three girls, Sandrine, 14, Serena, 16, and Nicole, 19, from a previous relationship. Married to Dawnette for three years, his brother worked as an appliance deliveryman, Dennis said.

With no criminal record and no history of drugs or tangles with police, detectives are sifting through information to try to figure out how this man ended up Toronto's most recent homicide victim, after a violent week that saw the lives of two others claimed by gun violence.

Nearby residents congregated outside various homes yesterday.

Michelle Brown, 46, who said her children play with the Dockery kids, said if it hadn't been for the rain, people would have been outside and could have spotted, maybe even warded off, the perpetrators.

"Maybe if we were sitting outside we could have prevented it," she said. "Now there's a man dead and we're going to have to bury him."



