How life, death and murder haunt this Toronto ‘hero’

He stands, expression unreadable, as his co-accused lowers his head and the victim’s mother rocks in her seat, before rising and glaring at the two men who took her son’s life.

“I’ve been in this situation before,” says Mendez, smirking, as a court officer slips handcuffs around his wrists. It’s true — he has. Years ago, the verdict was manslaughter. And yet another murder trial still lies ahead for him.

Now 33, Mendez admits who he is — a gun-carrying drug dealer — as he testified this fall during the five-week trial in Toronto. This time, he denies pulling the trigger.

The scene unfolding in a courtroom this day is, in many ways, a grim epilogue to an acclaimed film made in Toronto two decades ago.

At the time, Mendez was just a kid, one of several featured in the documentary “EMPz 4 Life.” 

It followed a reformed criminal who was trying to steer a group of Black boys onto the right path in one of Toronto’s most impoverished neighbourhoods.

The film was hailed for its raw portrayal of young people navigating poverty, violence and racism.

It asked: Is there a way out?

Long after the cameras stopped rolling, the stories of Mendez and other “EMPz 4 Life” boys are offering one answer to the question. Mendez is not the only one from the film in prison. Some are dead. 

And events such as the recent verdict have come to break the heart of the man who was the film’s star.

“It’s a travesty what he’s done,” says Brian Henry, 47, the former mentor who once saw potential in Mendez — and told the world as much in the film. “But I’m not shocked.”

“There’s a lot of people who failed these kids,” Henry says quietly.

“Before they became adults, before they developed an understanding of what they’re doing, right and wrong, of the consequences of their behaviour, before all that happened, a lot of people had to fail them — including myself.”

If “EMPz 4 Life” had a sequel, it might be called the “EMPz 4 Life Curse,” Anthony Hutchinson, a consultant on the film, told the Star.

In the ’90s, Hutchinson was a young university professor who established a series of community-based projects targeting at-risk youth in Malvern, the Scarborough neighbourhood that is the backdrop of “EMPz 4 Life.”

In the fall of 2005, acclaimed filmmaker Allan King, a longtime Toronto resident, heard Hutchinson being interviewed on CBC Radio. King reached out and suggested he shadow Hutchinson using his “fly-on-the-wall” documentary style.

Hutchinson declined to let cameras follow him around; it was Brian Henry who stepped in after King, who died in 2009 at age 79, won him over. At the time, Henry was helping run a neighbourhood basketball league and had joined Hutchinson’s youth-focused community projects.

Henry wanted people to witness his own transformation, and to see that “these are just children and they’re scared, frustrated and worried.” The children included Mendez.

Mendez never knew his father. He spent some of his childhood in foster care, and, at 13, was already getting into trouble with the police. One of the film’s most memorable moments showed where this path could lead.

King’s documentary team arranged for Henry and Mendez to visit his older brother, Gavra Largie, in the now-closed Kingston Penitentiary. Largie was serving a life sentence for fatally shooting a stranger in downtown Toronto in 2001.

“You staying out of trouble? Cops can’t see you?” Largie asks his wide-eyed younger brother (Mendez is his only sibling not behind bars, he notes). 

“Can’t see me,” Mendez mutters, chewing gum. A thick cable chain lies on top of his oversized white T-shirt, his ear is adorned with a large diamond-like stud.

Acting as an interviewer, Henry explains that he has a “different level of credibility” with young people, as he invites Largie to share his experience of life inside the pen.

Largie says he would sever his arm for freedom and offers his little brother some advice.

He also makes a prediction: The boy will “do some bad things,” but Largie is certain: “He’s not going to deviate to the point where he’s going to end up like me.” 

When Largie says this, the camera focuses tightly on Mendez’s face. His expression is as inscrutable then as it would be in a Toronto courtroom 19 years later.

On a sunny September afternoon, about an hour’s highway drive west of Malvern, Henry reflects on his journey from self-described street thug to community organizer to sales and leasing consultant at a sprawling car dealership in Brampton.

“I’m doing my best,” he says, sitting behind a desk in his office.

Born in Guyana, Henry came to Canada with his widowed mother when he was 13 and felt he didn’t fit in. He wasn’t Black. He wasn’t white. He gravitated toward other marginalized youth. In Grade 8, he stood six-foot-two. Trouble followed. He ended up in group and foster homes and started racking up criminal charges, mainly for assault. Despite his imposing size and propensity for using his fists, Henry insists he never “had it in me to hurt anyone.”

“I was confused about how to behave and act in confrontations, so I always acted like a goon.”

The last time he was in jail was 2001.

“My son was born in 2003, and when I held my son,” he says, stopping as his eyes fill with tears. “I knew what had happened to me, and I was determined it wasn’t going to happen to him.”

He and his family settled in community housing on Empringham Drive in Malvern. (The “EMPz” in the documentary’s title was inspired by graffiti on the street.) His rap sheet made finding a job difficult. He began volunteering for Habitat for Humanity and mentoring a group of students, ages 13 to 15. Many already had criminal records; most came from fatherless homes.

In 2004, Toronto police conducted Project Impact, one of the city’s first major gang sweeps. While it resulted in the arrests of dozens of people living in Malvern, Henry recognized another generation was coming up to “fill the gaps.” He says he was determined to stop that from happening.

Henry was “somebody who was about as credible a spokesperson and advocate as you could get,” recalls Oliver Carroll, who was chair of the Toronto District Catholic School Board when he met Henry. The two shared the belief that the solution to guns and crimes was a preventative approach — not the tough law enforcement touted by police and politicians.

Henry, says Carroll, “really wanted to make a difference.”

For 12 weeks in early 2006, a videographer followed Henry around as he immersed himself in the lives of a group of boys and their families, some of them participating in a unique program at the Malvern Library taught by mathematician John Mighton.

“It was a very profound time of my life,” Henry says now.

One of the key themes in “EMPz 4 Life” is that relentless stereotyping meant these boys were already cast as bad guys with low IQs. “Black kids never go anywhere,” one of the boy’s moms says ruefully in one scene. So when Mighton tells Henry the boys are excelling, Henry beams like a proud parent. “You just made my day,” Henry says outside the library, where the thrice-weekly class was held.

The documentary also captures Henry’s many challenges: Getting the kids to show up to class. Bullet holes in the front door where one of them resides. Random police stops.

“EMPz 4 Life” debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2007, and Henry became a local “celebrity.” Hutchinson recalls Indigo CEO Heather Reisman calling him “an angel on Earth.” 

But there was a downside to the attention. It led to ruptured relationships and jealousy, and some of the Malvern youth began to resent Henry, says Hutchinson.

Henry says he was told he had a target on his back. (He believes it was connected to him telling a drug dealer to stop supplying guns and drugs to the younger guys.)

The “curse” first struck a few months after the film premiered at TIFF. In December 2007, Keyon Campbell, one of the boys mentored by Henry — and who appears in the film — was shot and killed on the doorstep of his Malvern home. He was 16.

“I was very, very proud of Keyon,” Henry says. “When he died, I took that really, really hard.”

Pierre Ellis, brother of EMPz alumni Chris Ellis, one of Henry’s youthful charges whose rap music features prominently in the film, was charged with his murder. (The charge was eventually dropped, though he pleaded guilty to firing shots at Campbell a few days before the killing, a police source involved in the case told the Star.)

Throughout the documentary, Henry urged the EMPz boys to reject criminality and, for a while, he felt he was reaching Mendez. “Jordan’s mind is sharp. He’s one of the smarter 13-year-olds I know,” Henry told his mother in the film.

But by 2011, long after Henry left Malvern, Mendez, by then 19, shot and killed Joel Waldron, 20; he and his younger brother, Johvan, made several brief appearances in “EMPz 4 Life.”

Mendez later admitted to shooting Waldron but claimed it was self-defence, despite the victim’s three gunshot wounds to his back and head. After two trials, he was convicted of manslaughter. 

Mendez stayed behind bars until his release in March 2021. Just three months later, he and a close friend shot up a parked vehicle in Scarborough, not far from Malvern, killing Keron Brathwaite, 27 — an innocent man to whom he had no connection — and injuring a female passenger. Mendez is still facing a trial in Oshawa for fatally shooting another man, nine days before killing Brathwaite.

At his sentencing hearing this fall, a Toronto judge described Mendez as a “seasoned criminal,” whose prospect for rehabilitation is “poor at best.” She imposed the mandatory life sentence for Brathwaite’s first-degree murder.

Earlier this year, in the same Toronto courthouse, Johvan Waldron, whose brother Mendez killed, was also sentenced to life after being convicted of killing a robbery victim and trying to kill another man. 

Interviewed by the Star over Zoom last January as he awaited sentencing in the Toronto East Detention Centre, the father of three wore a slight beard and glasses and had only a foggy recollection of being in the film. He was just 12 when he appeared in “EMPz 4 Life.”

Soft-spoken and polite, Waldron pushed back against the notion that growing up in a disadvantaged community predetermined his future. There was a way out, he says; it’s the justice system that has imprisoned him.

“They wrongfully convicted me,” he says. “Someone had to go down for this.”

Waldron watched his brother Joel die on a snowbank. Years ago, at Mendez’s sentencing hearing, Waldron’s mother described her son in court as broken. Asked by the Star about the impact his brother’s murder had on his life, Waldron clams up. Instead, he offers a broader critique of society, blaming biased policing, institutional neglect and racial inequality for the course his life has taken.

Provided a quick update about Brian Henry’s post-“EMPz 4 Life,” Waldron’s face lit up. “Wow, that’s good, that’s great. I’m happy for him,” he said.

“Let him know I said hello, if you talk to him.”

In May 2008, Toronto police raided Henry’s home after Keyon Campbell’s murder. Whatever they were looking for, they didn’t find it. Henry was charged with possessing a small amount of pot — a charge that was dropped. He says he has a hunch where the bogus tip came from, and he sued the police over it. But by 2009, he had moved out of Malvern. His marriage ended, and he sank into depression and abandoned the lawsuit.

“I didn’t have the energy for it anymore,” he says. No amount of money could replace his loss after leaving behind his work in Malvern. “It was basically my life,” he said.

He briefly went to York University, but needed to find work to provide for his growing family. (His three biological children are now 25, 23 and 21.) In 2014, Henry went into car sales and has been doing that ever since.

“It’s been a long road for me to try to come to terms emotionally with everything,” he says. Some of the boys he mentored are living productive lives. “I’ve gone to a few weddings.” He’s moved to tears — again — describing how he still “starts getting phone calls” on Father’s Day.

Nevertheless, he still struggles to shake the feeling that he was “inadequate.”

“I was doomed to failure,” he says.

Toronto psychotherapist Rod Cohen doesn’t disagree. He was Henry’s therapist when his world “came tumbling down.”

Cohen makes clear that he admires Henry. Still, Henry’s plan to help these kids “was a house of cards,” Cohen says, sitting in his upstairs office at Blake Boultbee Youth Outreach Service in the Pocket neighbourhood near Jones Avenue, south of Danforth Avenue.

Henry had such passion to save “the Keyons and the Jordans and all of those guys, because they were him. He was them, and he wanted to be the one who was going to get the guns out of their hands.” 

And then, “incredible things” happened. “It just took off, exploded. ‘EMPz 4 Life,’ getting funding, backers — he’s becoming a super guy in that world, doing remarkable things.”

But critical pieces were missing, Cohen says, such as training, professionalism and structure. “He didn’t come to this from a trained, professional perspective; he came from this life-lived experience,” and a belief that “I can save these kids.”

That’s not enough, Cohen says.

Transforming lives “doesn’t happen in a year, or a week,” he explains. “Real change takes a lifetime, and patience.”

Cohen points out it took years for him to establish what he and two other youth counsellors offer: “intensive, long-term therapy, comprehensive, community-based service, connecting with people where they are, and making it completely accessible.” But he did this after years of studying social work, psychotherapy and psychology, among other things.

Blake Boultbee Youth Outreach Service also has a board of directors, and “that’s why we’ve been here 36 years.” And, crucially, Cohen doesn’t live in the immediate area, unlike Henry, who had an open-door policy and sometimes could be out until 4 a.m. trying to ensure the boys were staying out of trouble.

There has to be “a strict ethical code about boundaries, and what it is to be engaged and involved in … people’s lives at the most intimate level.”

There’s also a bigger “practical piece,” Cohen says. How do you convince a successful drug dealer, empowered by his pistol and able to make a ton of money in a minute, that he’s better off with a menial job? 

It’s deep work, Cohen concludes. “I have more failures than successes, for sure.”

Teacher Oliver Carroll, the former chair of the Toronto District Catholic School Board, is dismayed to hear that Henry feels he failed. He likens it to the pointlessness of a doctor dwelling on the fact that some patients don’t get better.

“I hope Brian appreciates he didn’t fail — he did all he possibly could. The community and culture failed him and the boys.”

Back in Brampton, Henry tells the Star that after years of analysis and therapy, he’s coming to terms with everything. He has a new romantic partner and is doing well professionally, yet he can’t help feeling “there’s something always going to be missing,” he says.

“I stumbled my way through life, and then I stumbled my way into what I was meant to be doing,” he says. After a long pause, he adds, “but it ended. And now that it’s gone. I don’t think there’s anything that can replace it, the satisfaction that I got and the feelings of … being needed and finding my place in the world, that’s never coming back.

“I’m doing a lot better in terms of coming to terms with the reality of it. But it’s still a work in progress.”