A ‘cosmic’ Father’s Day tragedy at a Toronto bridge, two years on

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TORONTO — A 2007 Lexus is coursing up the Don Valley Parkway in Toronto en route to the suburb of Thornhill. It is noon on a sunny Sunday, June 16, 2024.

Father’s Day.

The driver is a woman named Cheryl G. She is the wife of her front-seat passenger, Harold “Hushy” Lusthouse, a 76-year-old retired accountant, avid golfer, and collector of rare Scotch bottles. They are on their way to visit Harold’s daughter, Tali, for a holiday brunch.

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Lusthouse, who has a slight cold, has spent the morning with his son, Landon, at an exhibition of art by the renegade known as Banksy, down at the foot of Yonge Street. Now the son, trying to avoid contracting his father’s virus, is scurrying to join them in a separate car, wending his way through the streets after picking up his little dog, Lola, at his condo near the Yorkdale Shopping Centre.

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What happens in the next few seconds as the Lexus crosses under the century-old, 12-storey-tall Leaside Bridge is so chilling and ghastly that most of the people to whom I have told the story say that it must be a writer’s invention. But if this were fiction, there would be no suddenly fatherless children in this city, and no father suddenly without a son.

As best as it can be reconstructed, a person on the bridge goes over the shoulder-high railing — whether as an intentional act of self-destruction or accidentally, perhaps slipping while taking a selfie or pranking atop the fence for a TikTok video or Instagram Reel — and plummets toward the six-lane roadway just as the Lexus passes below.

The falling pedestrian impacts the right side of the windshield of the sedan and is killed instantly. In the front seat, Lusthouse takes the force of the impact. Somehow, Cheryl is able to stop the vehicle. Except for a few scratches, she is physically uninjured. A nurse in a passing car witnesses the impact, pulls over, rushes to the Lexus, tugs Lusthouse out of the wreckage and restores his respiration and pulse. But his injuries are too severe. Two days later, Lusthouse dies in hospital.

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“Un film d’horreur,” headlines Radio-Canada.

What were the chances?

“How can you possibly try to comprehend what happened?” I ask the son of Harold Lusthouse.

“Cosmic,” he replies.

A fatal Father’s Day

I have spent the past year seeking to learn more about the man in the Lexus and about the person who jumped, or was thrown, or fell from the overpass like a meteor. As a journalistic enterprise, as a compelling urban mystery, and as a cautionary tale about the fragility of our brief lives, the story has led me across many of Toronto’s high bridges and into deeply private realms of grief, horror, wonder, hope and shame.

The official police and coroner’s records of what happened on that fatal Father’s Day are sealed from public view for privacy reasons.

Harold’s children — Tali Uditsky and Landon Lusthouse — have spoken passionately at Toronto City Hall about the need for a barricade at the Leaside Bridge that might prevent future tragedies. We will hear from them later.

One publicly available document from the Ontario Superior Court of Justice offers a few scant details of the incident and identifies the pedestrian on the bridge as a male with a name common to the Tamil populations of Sri Lanka and southern India. (The name can be translated as “Pearl-like Lord” and can be both a surname and a given name, like Taylor or Jordan or Scott in Canadian English.) No age, occupation, address, marital, immigration, educational status or medical history is included in the document. Search the man’s (or boy’s) name online and there is nothing.

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The Office of the Chief Coroner of Ontario will tell me only that the incident was not a case of an “unclaimed deceased person.” So, there must have been a family member, a friend or a charity that claimed the body and took it away for cremation or burial in this country or perhaps South Asia, if Canada was not his native land. But this is guesswork.

The prominent Tamil funeral homes in the Toronto region have no record of this particular deceased.

The editor of the Tamil Times tells me that he vaguely recalls the incident but adds, “We do not report suicides.”

How do you absorb that you’re never going to see your father again?

Tali Uditsky

This policy is in accordance with media recommendations issued by the Suicide Prevention Research Collaborative at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre. “We don’t want to normalize suicide,” says Dr. Mark Sinyor, the director of the program. “We don’t want to telegraph the message that society thinks that suicide is a ‘helpful’ way out.”

If it was a suicide.

The search proceeds. On a sunny spring day, I follow an internet trail of Tamil names (Satiswasan, Seevaratnam, Vilasonan, Kanyapathy …) to a handsome, newly built duplex off St. Clair Avenue East, within walking distance of the Leaside Bridge, if one were somehow compelled.

There is an effigy of Lord Ganesh above the door. A promising sign.

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Climb the steps, take a deep breath, ring the doorbell, present your card, ask the dreadful questions of a total stranger.

A woman opens the door. She has a bright red tilaka on her forehead and speaks very little English. (My grasp of the Tamil language is limited to “no problem” and what you say when somebody sneezes.) Pearl-like Lord is her landlord, apparently. She dials his number.

A young-sounding fellow answers. I explain, as contritely as I can, that I am trying to contact the family of a man or boy who was killed in a terrible accident on the Don Valley Parkway in 2024. But this is not the right house. The name is not uncommon. It was the landlord’s father’s first name, in fact. He has not heard of the case.

“It was a terrible tragedy for the man in the car and the man who jumped or fell,” I offer.

“A tragedy for the man in the car,” the Tamil man on the cellphone corrects me.

The tragic victim

“I can’t find an explanation for this,” Joodi Pollock, Harold Lusthouse’s first wife, is saying.

“I can’t think of a religious reason.

“I feel sorry for the person who jumps 150 feet from a bridge. He’s not trying to hurt someone else …”

I am in Landon’s living room with him and his sister, Tali. Tali has dialed Pollock, who is their mother and who was, I am told, on amicable terms with Lusthouse even after their divorce.

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Pollock worries about Cheryl, who was driving the Lexus on the well-travelled DVP on that fateful Father’s Day two years ago.

“How can she even close her eyes at night, I don’t know,” Pollock says.

Then she tells a story that her own children have never heard before.

“When I was six months pregnant with Tali,” she relates, “Harold had a car accident.”

She tells us that the front end of her husband’s car was T-boned by another vehicle with such force that the hood and engine were sheared away. The break was so clean that Harold was left sitting in the driver’s seat with his legs dangling into space. He would live another half century.

“He was unharmed,” Pollock says.

“The car was split in half. It was a miracle. He escaped something that maybe he shouldn’t have.

“He was a ghost who came out of that car.”

Cultural codes and suicide

In northwest Toronto, just off Finch Avenue, there is a district of body shops and warehouse churches. On a little street called Penn Drive is a house of Christian worship called Covenant of Promise Ministries, Inc. On the day that I come by, dozens of Black families are emerging from an afternoon service, their vibrant robes and suits and gowns illuminating a snow-flecked sky.

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Across the lane, behind a Tim Hortons and near a Salvadoran eatery, a Hindu temple is announced by a stupa on the roof of an otherwise ordinary building that might have been a factory or wholesale terminal before its conversion to ecclesiastical purposes.

The interior of the Thiruchendur Murugan Temple is a garish — to Western eyes — carnival of painted plaster tigers, shrines to four-armed gods, and blue-skinned deities bedecked in garlands of flowers and supplicated with fruit. Two or three male devotees are padding around barefoot and shirtless. All is silence.

A woman comes up to me and writes her name in my notebook as Yasotha Nima, a communicant and lay volunteer. I ask if she has heard about the Tamil man or boy who jumped or fell from the Leaside Bridge in June of 2024. She answers, “Ten years ago it happened, too. I heard about it two times.”

Yasotha Nima says that she has been in Canada for 30 years and boasts that her two sons are educated men “in accounting and computing.”

Suicide, she says, “breaks the cycle of birthing.

“That is what they teach us.

“Even in kindergarten, we knew that.”

In Tamil society, the family of a person who has died by suicide never would speak of it, she says. The stain is eternal, the purgatory infinite.

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“You are born again and again and again, but you never reach the heaven,” Yasotha says.

“You come again and you struggle. You come again and you struggle. You come again and you struggle and you struggle.”

A family stricken

The trauma team worked for two full days to save Harold Lusthouse after the falling man or boy crushed him on Father’s Day on the DVP.

“We usually always travelled together,” Landon relates at his Yorkdale condo. “But he had a little cold, so we went separate. And then I was coming home to get Lola. I was zigzagging through the city to get here, to get the dog. I didn’t even make it halfway home from the exhibit. And then Tali called me.

“The first call was just, ‘Dad was in an accident.’ Neither one of us knew the level. We didn’t understand.

“I was just like, ‘Oh, he’s going to be delayed.’ Like, he got in a fender-bender.

I’m not ignorant to think my family and I are immune from tragedy.

Landon Lusthouse

“The second call was totally different,” says Tali, a mother of two who trained in chiropractic medicine. “The wife of one of Cheryl’s sons called me and said, ‘They are not going to be coming to you for brunch.’ And then she told me that a man, a person, jumped off of the bridge and landed on their car. And then she said, either in that call or very fast after that next call — I can’t quite remember because it was all so shocking — that they’re working on him.

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“She said he’s breathing, he’s moving, he’s this, that, and the other. I didn’t quite register that this was what it was.

“I was shaking. I told my husband, ‘Mike, they’re not coming for brunch. We’ve got to go to the hospital.’ I still didn’t fully understand. How do you absorb that you’re never going to see your father again?” Tali says,

“And it was absurd: ‘Someone jumped on his car,’” recalls Landon, who works for a fire-prevention equipment firm. “The absurdity of it, because it’s just so ludicrous.

“Out of the sky. Literally. Out of the sky.

“I’m not ignorant to think my family and I are immune from tragedy. It was a tragic thing that happened. I focus more on, you know, that he’s gone.

“The loss is like, ‘Why him?’ Why not someone that’s a piece of s–t in the world?” Landon asks

“Is it because the universe is random?” I ask.

“I definitely think the universe is random,” Landon answers.

“There’s so many horrible things that are happening in the world,” his sister adds. “There are so many wonderful people that for whatever reason are losing children. There’s war, there’s also countries where people don’t even have food. They don’t even have water. So, I’m looking at, like, the bigger picture of life. And what I’m choosing to focus on is in the life that he lived, he lived it.

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“My dad was an amazing man, as a father, a grandfather and a human. He was well-liked and well-loved,” says the daughter.

“He came from four brothers. So, it was him and three brothers. And two of them had tragic deaths. Three of them now, counting Dad.”

Tali says that one of Harold Lusthouse’s three brothers burned to death in a fire at the age of 22 “before we were alive.” Another brother, also in his early 20s, took his own life. The third died of cancer. And now this.

How often does this happen?

You may be wondering: How often does something like this happen?

A few weeks after Harold Lusthouse was crushed to death on the Don Valley Parkway, a woman named Margarita Novela Galindo was sitting in the passenger seat, next to her husband, Florencio, on a freeway in Los Angeles when a man jumped from an overpass and hit their car.

Ms. Galindo lingered in intensive care for more than a month before succumbing. Florencio was uninjured.

“He doesn’t know what problems the man may have had to commit suicide, but he doesn’t have any resentment,” the couple’s son said of his grieving father.

The next week, a 17-year-old high school dancer and cheerleader named Emily Gold intentionally jumped into the carpool lane of California Route 210.

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“Several vehicles struck her body,” it was reported. “None of the drivers stopped.”

Last August, in Pasadena, Calif., a woman reported to be in her 50s, “fell or jumped” from a parkway overpass and hit a moving car. She died, of course. The driver was uninjured.

A few years before that, a boy jumped from an overpass in Virginia and landed on an SUV driven by a young woman named Harris from a suburban town in Maryland called Olney. The boy was 12 years old.

Organ donation a silver lining

“When we realized that Dad was not getting better,” Tali Uditsky says, “and when we realized that he was going to go, the only thing that gave me and my brother strength is thinking that potentially somebody could benefit from his tissues and his organs. It’s a silver lining.

“It’s the only thing we had left, you see. All we had was the hope.”

Uditsky has become a passionate advocate for organ donation, and she is dismayed by Canada’s standing in the middle of the pack of prosperous nations.

In 2024, Canada ranked 12th in the world for organ donation by percentage of population, with a rate of living donors more than 25 per cent lower than the United States, according to the Canadian Institute for Health Information.

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“It’s kind of a crazy thing to say and to hear, but some people feel that if they sign that, ‘Yes, I’m willing to be an organ donor,’ perhaps the doctors won’t work as hard for them,” Uditsky says. “Maybe there’ll be something in the back of their mind, well, ‘He’s not going to have a quality of life, so this other person is better off.’

“But when we were in the hospital, the doctors working on my dad refused to allow me to even discuss organ donation with them. They don’t want any input from you. They were like, ‘This is my patient. Please, we’re not talking about this now.’

“No one has these psychological thoughts on purpose. But people are worried that they won’t be saved if doctors know.

“One of the reasons that I think Canada has one of the lowest success rates for people saying that they’re willing to be a donor is that we live in a very big melting pot of cultures. And doctors try very, very, very carefully because there could be big problems if somebody feels or claims later that someone has taken their organs or stolen their organs. I know it sounds crazy because maybe we don’t think that way, but doctors never know what their cultural preferences are and tread lightly and don’t go there. Most religions support organ donation but many people don’t realize that.

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“And so, the best solution to this problem, to make Canada a better place, is that families need to have conversations with each other. What is your comfort level with this? Would you take an organ if something happened to you and you needed something or something happened to your family member. Have the conversation. That’s all I’m asking for moving forward, that people talk. Make your wishes known clearly so your loved ones are never left guessing during unimaginable grief.”

Deaths of despair

“The majority of suicides are relatively impulsive,” says Sunnybrook Health Science’s Sinyor, with 20 years of research into what he calls “deaths of despair” backing him and, he tells me, “some experience in my personal life of loss to death by suicide.”

“When we are talking about lower-lethality methods, people do survive,” Sinyor reports. “One of the terrible tragedies that we know from talking to survivors is that people who attempt suicide often immediately regret it.

“The overwhelming number of people who think about suicide never attempt suicide. The majority of people who attempt suicide never die of suicide. We know that public messages of survival save lives. Unfortunately, what gets reported are the people who have died.”

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Two years ago, Sinyor and a team of six specialists from Sunnybrook and the University of Toronto produced an academic paper examining all suicides in Toronto from 1998 through 2023. Hanging (1,721 cases), jumping from height (1,280) and poisoning (955) were the most prevalent methods.

“People who died by jumping from height were the youngest group and more likely to be female,” their report noted. “They were least likely to have past suicide attempts and leave suicide notes. People who died by jumping from height were most likely to have past psychiatric or emergency department visit in the past week.”

“There is a myth that has been around for decades, if not hundreds of years, that suicide is not preventable,” Sinyor says. “But strong interventions — not just clinical, but public health messages and barriers — they prevent suicide. They save lives.

“It is important for society to encourage people who are suicidal to get help, and it’s important to be honest about that. We can reduce the number of deaths of despair. We know we can do that.”

In 1975, a San Francisco psychiatrist interviewed six men and one woman who had survived jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge and hitting the water at 75 miles an hour.

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At that time, the Golden Gate was the No. 1 destination for self-destruction in the world. (According to a 1983 study, half of all people who jump from the Golden Gate Bridge drive over the equally high Oakland Bay Bridge to access the more famous vermilion span.)

One survivor said that, as he prepared to let go of the railing, he was asked by a God-like voice, “Why are you doing this? Why are you giving up?” A different survivor said, “I was refilled with a new hope and purpose in being alive. It’s beyond most people’s comprehension. I appreciate the miracle of life — like watching a bird fly — everything is more meaningful when you come close to losing it.”

I park my car on Hopedale Avenue and, shaking, walk onto the Leaside Bridge.

Far below, the traffic roars, incessant and uncaring, at more than double the anticipated volume — when the road opened fully in 1966 — of 60,000 vehicles a day.

A sign bolted to a light pole says: DISTRESS CENTRE, 416 408 HELP (4357) WE LISTEN 24 HOURS A DAY.

“By putting those signs there, we are letting people know that they are not alone,” Anne Smith, director of Fund Development for the Distress Centres of Greater Toronto (DCOGT), says. “Whether they even look at the sign, who knows? When someone is in that state of mind, who knows whether that sign will make a difference.”

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“There’s a lot of hang-ups,” reports David Lloyd, chief program officer of the DCOGT, particularly on the crisis phones that have been installed on TTC subway platforms.

“There’s a lot of pranks. But it’s all about that one call that isn’t a prank. It’s about being there for that one particular person.”

“Sadly, they don’t think that tomorrow is going to make any difference,” Smith says. “They’re at that stage where they don’t see any hope. They don’t see any light.

“A good friend of my son died by suicide at the age of 19. His mom said that on that day he was in the best mood he had been in for a very long time. She asked him how he was doing with a school project and he said, ‘Don’t worry, Mom, I’ve got a plan.’”

Returning to Leaside Bridge

“What happens when you pass by Millwood Road and you go under the Leaside Bridge?” I ask the late Harold Lusthouse’s daughter and son.

“The first time,” Tali says, “I had to be on the phone with my husband. I phoned him and I said, ‘I’m about to go. I need to be on the phone with you,’ and he stayed on the phone with me. And it was … it took my breath away.”

“There are those TikTokers,” Landon says. “They hang off of bridges and climb towers and they dangle from one hand and take a picture. But why would you do that over a highway? Most of the bridges are over the river. Not where people drive. This guy was trying to jump into traffic so that he would die.”

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Last October, the Transportation Services and Engineering and the Construction Services departments of the City of Toronto prepared a report examining a permanent or temporary safety barrier on the Leaside Bridge, a quarter-century after the so-called Luminous Veil on the Bloor Street Viaduct virtually eliminated that structure as a suicide destination second on this continent only to the Golden Gate Bridge.

The panel recommended the immediate installation of a curved fence as a temporary measure at a cost of $2.4 million, and “permanent barrier design and installation as part of the next major state-of-good-repair project for the bridge, currently programmed for 2037.”

“Since that report, planning and design work has been completed,” Jacquelyn Hayward, director, Strategic Policy & Programs, City of Toronto, tells me in an email. Construction of the interim barrier will soon begin, with completion expected in December.

“Have you ever gone up on that bridge and looked over?” I ask the victim’s children.

“No,” says Landon Lusthouse. “Not since.”

A grieving father

This precious life of ours is but a fragile raft, reads a Tamil poem from 2,000 years ago, part of an anthology called the Purananuru.

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Borne down the waters of some mountain stream

That over boulders, roaring, seeks the plain,

Through storms with flashing lightning we descend.

The raft goes on as the fates ordain.

It is a soaking afternoon in late spring. My months of scouring of online registries and articles in search of the person who fell to earth that awful Father’s Day have come up empty. In 21st-century Toronto, there may be dozens or even hundreds of men from India or Sri Lanka with the first or second or honorific name that translates to Pearl-like Lord.

One last attempt to try to answer the Who and the Why.

In Etobicoke, across Hwy. 427 from Toronto Pearson International Airport, there is a community of townhouses arranged in rows, four or five dwellings to each rank. Each group shares an address that I found in an old directory, differentiated only by a hyphen. For example, there is a 23-1, a 23-2, a 23-3, and so on. This will be door by door.

After three strikeouts — I skip a door with a Polish flag — I come to the house at the north end of the row. Burly workmen are hauling out old carpeting. Someone must be home.

Climb the steps, take a deep breath, ring the doorbell, present your card, ask the dreadful questions of a total stranger.

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A slender man, brown-skinned, opens. He looks to be about 60 years old.

“I am trying to contact the family of a man who was killed in a terrible accident on the Don Valley Parkway in 2024 …”

He looks at my card and then my face.

“No newspapers,” he says. “No talking.”

“Was —– your son?”

He nods. The search is over.

“I am so sorry,” I blunder. “You must think of him every moment. Can you please tell me about him?”

“No thinking, no talking,” the man reaffirms.

“We have had enough of tragedy,” the father says. And, firmly, he closes the door.

If you’re thinking about suicide or are worried about a friend or loved one, please contact 988: Suicide Crisis Helpline by calling or texting 988 toll-free. The service is available 24/7. If you or someone you know is in immediate danger, call 911.

Main image: Toronto’s Leaside Bridge. By Peter J. Thompson/National Post

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