It happened in a split second.
From her perch in the back, she could barely register that the SUV had stopped moving, let alone that a gunman had opened fire.
"Get down," Oliver Martin said calmly from the passenger's seat, craning his head in her direction. He shifted in his seat belt to dodge bullets. "Get down," he said.
She ducked, burying her head in the middle seat. Confused, frightened, she couldn't tell if this was a joke – if the group of guys she had just spent the evening with were playing a prank.
"It sounded like firecrackers," she said yesterday, hands clasped at her chin, tears cooling a path down her reddened cheeks. "It was surreal."
For the first time, the woman who has become known as the girl in the back seat of the SUV has talked publicly about the night Martin, her boyfriend of 10 months, and Dylan Ellis were gunned down mere inches from where she crouched, probably obscured from view by tinted windows.
The two handsome 25-year-olds, best friends, were killed in a seemingly random, unprovoked attack June 13, just seconds after their black SUV came to a stop on Richmond St. W., near Niagara St., in front of a friend's condominium.
A gunman approached the SUV on the driver's side and began shooting, before fleeing, possibly on a bicycle. He is still being sought. The 22-year-old woman's identity cannot be revealed for her safety.
When the shooting finally stopped, she lifted her head. She saw Martin and Ellis, who was in the driver's seat. They were motionless. She was hysterical.
Her heart beating loudly, she reached for the door and found it locked. She couldn't get out. She panicked. "I had no idea what happened," she said. "It literally hadn't registered. I thought they would get up and be fine. But I was freaking out. I couldn't touch them."
Friends of the trio surrounded the SUV, feverishly trying to find pulses and calling for help. Before she tumbled out when someone opened the door, she made the kind of call to 911 that homicide Det. Sgt. Gary Giroux describes as being able to raise the hair on the back of your neck. It was horrible, unintelligible.
She stood on the pavement outside the apartment building.
"And I was screaming for an ambulance," she said.
Two months later, the diminutive girl in the back of the SUV is still just going through the motions. She bends a lithe arm to support her head as she sits on a white sofa in her parents' Rosedale home.
She couldn't get out of bed for days after her friends were killed. Since then she's become close with the men's families, acting stoic at their sides, sleeping as much as possible so she has the energy, she says, to fight off flashbacks. She is petrified to go out in the city at night. So she stays home, preparing for graduate school in the fall.
To help her through, she wears a four-leaf-clover charm around her neck – her friends bought it because it's identical to the one Martin always wore. His mother, Susan Dudeck, has that one now.
"I have to be strong," she said. "I have to do what they would have wanted. All I want to do is absorb what they were about. Their spirit. It's sad that they're not here anymore."
She met Martin last year, introduced to him by Ellis' mom at a party. They took their time to develop a relationship, she said, but it picked up speed when she got home from a trip to Europe in the spring.
Martin wasn't big on public displays of affection and that's why she was surprised that June night when he tenderly grabbed her hand the moment she showed up outside the Richmond St. W. condo – where eight to 10 people were watching an NBA game. And where later that evening the shooting would occur.
She smiled when he came outside to greet her – she was supposed to meet friends for a drink, then sleep at Martin's house (she had dropped of her stuff there earlier in the day). But, plans change.
Martin grabbed her hand at the gate and the two of them walked around the corner onto Queen St. W., and headed to the 7/11. They probably passed the same video cameras that yielded only dark, grainy footage of the area when detectives scoured it days later.
She bought a Slushie, he bought a Popsicle and some candy before they returned to the condo to watch the game.
When the Celtics won, Ellis offered to drive the couple home and the three piled into his parents' black SUV. They had reached Spadina Ave. when Ellis' cellphone rang.
Earlier in the evening, he had taken his friend's keys to the condo while he went to pick up dinner at Fresh, a vegetarian restaurant nearby.
He still had the keys.
Ellis briefly considered dropping off Martin and his girlfriend before turning back.
"We were having so much fun in the car," she said. "I remember not wanting to get out. We were laughing so hard the whole ride home. They're the funniest guys."
Before the SUV turned around to go back, she snapped a picture of the pair with her camera. Ball caps turned back, they squinted at each other with glee. It had been a typical, good night.
Hip hop was playing in the car and just before the SUV made a left turn from Niagara St., back onto Richmond, she caught Martin peering at her in the rear-view mirror. The three cracked up again, when Ellis caught sight of it, too.
After the shooting, the girl in the back of the SUV didn't find out her friends were dead for some time. At the police station she spoke to detectives and "no one would tell me," she says.
She heard her father and stepfather talking to police behind closed doors in a nearby room. Much of the conversation was unintelligible but she heard enough to know she would never see her boyfriend or his best friend alive again.
Since then, she's had many conversations with homicide detectives and helped them posit a theory about what could have led to this tragedy. She still feels it was random violence – maybe not in the mind of the perpetrator, but to her, Ellis and Martin did nothing to precipitate such an attack.
"They did nothing," she said. "There's obviously a reason. But I don't want people to assume it's something that they did because they didn't do anything."
Anyone with information on the shootings is asked to contact police at 416-808-7400.
