Ten Years to the Day Since a Stray Round Off a Rivertowne Laneway Killed Peggy Ann Smith on Her Daughter’s Back Porch: Toronto Police Attribute It to a Don Mount Court and Regent Park Gang War and Still Do Not Have a Name (August 27, 2026)
TORONTO — Ten years ago this evening, at about 6:10 p.m. on August 27, 2016, Peggy Ann Smith was sitting on the back porch of her daughter’s house on Munro Street, near Broadview Avenue and Dundas Street East, when two men began firing at a residence nearby. One round travelled far enough to reach the porch. Smith, 61, a mother of three and grandmother of 13, died where she sat.
What makes this file worth a briefing on a beat that mostly runs charge sheets is a single sentence Toronto police have never walked back: Smith was the innocent victim of a gang war between members of the former Don Mount Court and Regent Park communities. That is an explicit organizational attribution from the service itself — the kind most files this month have conspicuously lacked. It has been on the record for a decade and it has produced no arrest.
What Is Established, and What Has Never Been
- The killing: August 27, 2016, at approximately 6:10 p.m., on the back porch of her daughter’s home on Munro Street near Broadview Avenue and Dundas Street East, in the Rivertowne area of east Toronto. Smith was struck by a stray bullet and died at the scene.
- The victim: Peggy Ann Smith, 61, known in the neighbourhood as Nanny Peggy. A long-time east Toronto resident, mother of three, grandmother of 13.
- The police attribution: Toronto police say Smith was the innocent victim of a gang war between members of the former Don Mount Court and Regent Park communities.
- The suspects: shortly after the killing the force released security camera images of two male suspects believed to have been firing gunshots toward a residence near where Smith was shot. Neither has ever been identified.
- The file: Toronto Police Service Homicide 48/2016, now carried by the TPS Cold Case Unit. Det. Sgt. Steve Smith has carriage. No relation to the victim is indicated.
- The scale of the backlog: the Cold Case Unit is investigating roughly 800 unsolved Toronto homicides. This is one of them.
- The commemoration: the laneway where Smith died was named in her honour in July 2017. Ward councillor Paula Fletcher, Toronto-Danforth, helped the family relocate from the area after the killing.
- What has never been released: the calibre or type of firearm, the number of rounds fired, the identity of the intended target, the address that was being shot at, whether either suspect was ever a named person of interest, and whether any charge was ever contemplated against anyone.
The Detective Sergeant Says the Answer Is in the Neighbourhood
Det. Sgt. Steve Smith of the Cold Case Unit calls this one of the most horrific homicide files the city carries, and is direct about where he thinks it stands. “We know that there’s people in the community who know who did this,” he told CP24. “These things don’t happen in a vacuum.”
What he is asking for is narrower than it sounds. Not testimony, not a court appearance — a name. “We just need a name, anything that we can work with,” he said, noting anonymous tips are welcome and that informants would not need to appear in court. “Once we know the offender’s name, it opens up a whole other host of options for us. … We just need to know who in order to make those connections.” That is a cold case detective describing an evidentiary file that is built but unattached — material that means something only once there is a person to attach it to.
Ten Years Is Also a Technological Gap
Smith made a second observation that is easy to skip past: he believes this murder would likely have been solved had it happened today, because of the prevalence of video footage and other technological advances now available.
That is a real difference and it is visible across this beat. Toronto Police charged Justin Longshaw with first-degree murder in the 2022 killing of Ding Ping Wang this week after a witness came forward and led investigators to plaza surveillance video from the day before the shooting. The Rivertowne file has video — the two suspect images came from a security camera — but nothing that resolved into an identity. A laneway shooting in 2016 sat in a coverage gap that a laneway shooting in 2026 largely would not.
A Gang Attribution Nobody Has Been Charged Over
Don Mount Court was a Toronto Community Housing development immediately south of the shooting scene, demolished and rebuilt in the 2000s as Rivertowne. Regent Park, a kilometre and a half west, went through its own redevelopment over the same period. Toronto police place the shooting inside a conflict between people associated with those two former communities.
Two things follow. The first is that the attribution is not incidental — the force has attached this death to a specific inter-community conflict rather than calling it random gunfire. The second is that a decade of that attribution has produced no charge against anyone, in this killing or, publicly, in the conflict it is said to belong to. Gangland Files is not extending the label beyond what the service has said, and the service has said this much and no more.
The Family Is Asking for the Same Thing the Detective Is
Smith’s relatives issued a written statement to mark the anniversary, and the operative passage is not the grief. It is the ask. They said what makes the loss harder is knowing that those responsible have never been held accountable, that the family has carried unanswered pain for a decade, and that they want answers, accountability and justice.
They urged anyone who knows who is responsible to find the courage to come forward. The anniversary lands harder this year: the statement notes the recent death of Smith’s long-time husband, John, who did not live to see the file closed. Fletcher, who was in the neighbourhood in the days after the shooting when scores of people gathered to mourn, put it in fewer words: a completely innocent woman was killed, and there should be some justice.
TPS Homicide 48/2016 — Munro Street, 2016 to 2026
Primary Wire Sources
- CP24 / CTV News Toronto, by Joanna Lavoie: “Toronto woman’s family marks grim 10-year anniversary as police continue search for her killer” — published Thursday, August 27, 2026 at 6:02 a.m. EDT. Date confirmed on the article page. All quotations from Det. Sgt. Steve Smith, Councillor Paula Fletcher and the Smith family are drawn from that report.
- No police release exists for this file today. The Toronto Police Service news release index was read directly and runs continuously from August 25 to the evening of August 26 with no item on this homicide, and a site search returns nothing. The outlet is the primary source. The TPS newsroom will be re-checked on a later run should the service mark the anniversary.
- Homicide number 48/2016 and the Cold Case Unit’s caseload figure of roughly 800 unsolved Toronto homicides are as stated in that report.