Homicide in Bedford Park home shocks neighbourhood

[attach]7283[/attach]A woman is dead, her son is charged with murder and neighbours in Bedford Park are in shock following a violent domestic incident on Nov. 25 at 133 Ronan Ave.

Police say Janet Williams, 60, was stabbed to death just after 3 p.m. in her Mount Pleasant Road and Lawrence Avenue East area home. Neil Williams, 27, was arrested at the scene and charged with second degree murder.

At the scene, officers could be seen inside the home taking photos in various rooms on the main floor while neighbours occasionally stepped onto their porches to see what was happening.

“I’m trying to explain it to my kids,” said Craig Laurence as he looked toward the crime scene from his Bowood Avenue home. “They saw it on the news.

“My son immediately recognized it and ran to the front door.”

Laurence said his children are too young to fully grasp what transpired, adding it’s not the sort of thing he’d expect to see in the neighbourhood.

“It’s sad any way you look at it,” he said.

A neighbour who lives a few houses away, said the Williamses had lived at the Ronan Avenue address for about 15 years, and that Janet Williams was an artist who would often travel with a partner to France or Spain, and then be busy painting when she returned.

The walls inside the home are decorated with many of those paintings, said the neighbour, who would not give her name. The neighbour said she had met Neil Williams only once, about 10 years ago.

While she knows he was living there, and believes he was attending school, the last time she saw him was in the summer when he was walking with his mother, the neighbour said.

She said the killing, which she described as “a little close to home,” came as a shock.

“It makes you so sad,” she said. “She doesn’t deserve that.”

It was Toronto’s 54th homicide of the year, and the first in the area in five years.