The Globe tells us about the TTC’s two “court advocates.” In classic journalistic style, we approach the topic with a relatable human anecdote.
On… the night of the attack, [collector Joanne] McFadden was staffing a booth at Dundas station when a man cradling a 26-ounce bottle of liquor told her he only had one dollar to pay for his subway ride.
“I said to him, ‘If you took the 26er back to the liquor store where you got it, then you’d have money for the subway,’ ” she recalled. The man, Mr. Musuli, left for a minute, then walked through an open gate without paying.
Spotting him, Ms McFadden left her booth and demanded he pay up. Mr. Musuli punched her in the chest, a move she did not take lightly. “I had a pop in my left hand… I punched him quite a few times and threw my pop on him,” she recalled with a laugh.
[I]n the courtroom, Mr. Musuli’s lawyer explained the accused had previously lived in a shelter, and his mental-health workers and doctors would need to be contacted for the pre-sentence report.
Mr. Musuli was, in short, the kind of needy and troubled culprit the advocates often meet in court.
And McFadden was and apparently is the kind of easily angered, embittered TTC lifer with a penchant for escalating arguments still prevalent in the system. She made it worse. That’s my informed opinion based on years of dealing with disagreement-escalating TTC drivers – up to and including an incident last month that I had to document in writing with a signature so union and management would take it seriously.
Given two months to do so, neither of the court advocates mentioned in the article answered my mail about the escalation issue, nor did the only plausible Joanne McFadden on Facebook confirm she was one and the same person as the entitled, crabby, pampered, defended lifer depicted in the newspaper article.