'He came at me and started stabbing.' Canada has a serious knife problem

Dr. Julie Woods doesn’t remember which of the six stab wounds came first. She does remember becoming aware of her neck, and the warm blood pouring down it and onto the pavement. The blood didn’t seem to be spurting from the wound. “I don’t see anything pumping,” she remembers thinking. While the blade hadn’t reached the deeper carotid artery, it had punctured the larger left jugular vein, a major blood vessel.

On May 13, 2023, the day before Mother’s Day, a warm and breezy afternoon, Allan Timko, then 70, tried to kill Woods, his former daughter-in-law, his grandchildren’s mother, outside her Grimsby home in Ontario’s Niagara region.

The night before the brutal attack, which a sentencing judge would later describe as “the stuff of nightmares,” Woods, then 41, and Scott McKenzie — her boyfriend, now her husband — had watched the Florida Panthers eliminate the Leafs from the Stanley Cup playoffs.

Woods’ two young children were with their father that weekend; it was his stretch with the kids. Married in December 2005, separated in January 2018, the couple shared equal parenting time but were still going through a drawn-out legal battle. It was not about custody. “I was never trying to take the kids away.” Woods, an emergency medicine and palliative care doctor, is the support payer. The remaining issues involved financial matters.

Woods had hoped five years of acrimonious litigation would soon be behind her when she left her home shortly after nine that morning to meet her lawyer. A family law trial was set to start three days later. McKenzie, meanwhile, texted a friend, hoping to arrange a lunch meet-up.

Around the time Woods pulled out of her driveway, her ex-father-in-law left his own home in Beamsville, about six kilometres away.

Timko, who’d sold his pickup truck two days earlier, along with a sports memorabilia collection, made his way first on foot, then hitched a ride to Woods’ neighbourhood, where he roamed the next three hours, waiting for her to return.

Doorbell and surveillance cameras captured a stocky, grey-and-silver-haired man, wearing glasses and blue jeans, a big green backpack slung over his back, inside of which he’d packed a chef’s knife. He was wearing a three-quarter-length winter coat, warm for May.

Woods left the lawyer’s meeting that Saturday around noon. She called McKenzie from her car by hands-free phone. His lunch plans had fallen through, so he had decided to hang at her house until she got home.

Woods pulled into her driveway next to McKenzie’s car about 30 minutes later; a heavy-duty file box stuffed with legal documents was perched on her passenger seat. She got out and, still on the phone with McKenzie, walked a few doors down to a community mailbox. “Hey, I’m home now, I’ll see you in a sec,” she told him,   hanging up.

Back at her car, she grabbed her tote bag, slinging it across her body. She put her mail and phone on top of the big banker’s box. As she turned toward the road to shut the door with her hip, her hands full, she saw Timko coming at her from the other side of McKenzie’s car.

She doesn’t recall when she saw the knife. Only that suddenly, “he came at me and started stabbing.”

She backed up until she was trapped between the garage door and the grills of both cars. Timko, 230 pounds to her 130, lunged, knocking her to the ground, pinning her beneath him. “He straddled me. He was over my hips. My legs were useless.” Timko, wielding the knife in his right hand, started stabbing the left side of her body. The man she considered a second father while she was married to his son didn’t say a word as he drove the knife into her.

He just grunted with the exertion.

Violence at close range

Plunging a blade into another person’s body takes a certain kind of uncontrolled savagery. Unlike firing a gun, people can’t be stabbed from a distance. The act is intimate, requiring close contact and physical force. Researchers on violence have warned such attacks are an overlooked and neglected source of death and injury in Canada. And, by many measures, they are on the rise.

While much of the media and public attention focuses on guns and mass shootings — justifiable, following horrific massacres such as the recent attack at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School in Northern British Columbia that left nine dead, or the Nova Scotia mass attack in which 23 died — knives are the second-most common weapon used to kill in Canada. In British Columbia and Quebec, killings by stabbing outnumbered homicides by shooting in 2024, according to StatCan.

Moreover, bladed weapons are often the weapon of choice for lethal attacks against women and intimate partner violence. In the five-year period 2020 to 2024, more women were killed by stabbing (336) than by shooting (225).

Police don’t seize knives to nearly the same extent as they seize guns, unless they’re prohibited, such as the switchblade types. But in addition to being mostly legal, cheap, available everywhere and easier to get than a gun, knives can hurt people very quickly.

Victims might think they can do the “Hollywood, knock-it-out-of-their-hands type of things, (but) they are so quick and so sharp,” said Ottawa Deputy Police Chief Trish Ferguson.

“What I see oftentimes in reports is that people thought they were just being punched, and they realize they’ve got a hole in them. People don’t see the knife until it’s too late.”

Not only are knives easy to conceal, it doesn’t take a whole lot of skill to kill with a blade.

‘This is how I’m going to die’

Looking back, Woods doesn’t remember feeling a lot of pain at first. “I don’t remember if it hurt,” she said, possibly because of the adrenalin rush. She remembers being aware that the neck wound was serious. She lost an estimated 750 mL to one litre — three to four cups — of blood from the neck at the scene.

What she mostly remembers is fear.

Working in palliative care, you think about death a lot, she said. “And I remember thinking, ‘Holy s–t, this is my story. This is how I’m going to die.’” Alone, on her driveway, stabbed to death at 41.

She thought about her two young kids, “about how I was never going to see their beautiful faces again.” But she was still conscious.  “I still have a chance,” she thought. She began screaming, loudly and desperately, and grabbed for the knife with her left hand. She remembers the feeling of it slicing across her palm, shredding the web space between her thumb and index finger, ripping layers of skin from the tendons and bones beneath.

When McKenzie, in the rear living room, heard the screams, he thought it was the squeal of neighbourhood kids playing. At six-foot-one, he’s got a thick, athletic build, a kid from Hamilton who grew up playing hockey, including two seasons for the OHL, and who still plays this day. As he moved closer to the front door, he realized it wasn’t kids; this was a terrified scream.

He bolted out the door and saw “this big old guy” on top of Woods. “What the f–k are you doing to her?” he yelled.

“I ran over and got over top of him and started pulling and punching; I didn’t know there was a knife,” McKenzie said. “And nothing — he’s not saying anything. Just grunting and trying to keep at Julie.” He grabbed Timko by the collar, pulling while he rained blows on the back and sides of his head. Woods could feel the punches reverberating through her body. For one horrifying moment, she feared Timko was going to collapse on top of her with the knife.

Finally, McKenzie wrestled him off. The knife had fallen to the ground beside her head. “Get out of here,” McKenzie yelled at Woods. “The frightening thing for me, and I’ll always remember: As she started to get up, blood started squirting from her neck.”

Woods grabbed the knife, worried someone else could be lurking, waiting to attack, and ran next door. The neighbour’s first thought, when he opened the door to the pounding and ringing doorbell and saw Woods standing there, bleeding heavily from the neck, was, “How do you get a kitchen injury to your neck ?”

ER visits for stabbings on the rise

While serious violence is disproportionately perpetrated by young boys and men against other young boys and men in big urban areas, stabbing injuries affect people of “all ages and demographics,” according to a study involving 26,657 stabbing injuries in Ontario over a 14-year-period, of which 724 were fatal.

Across Canada, emergency room visits and hospitalizations for assault and injury purposely inflicted by a “sharp object“ — knives, broken glass, screwdrivers, nails, scissors, jagged metal pieces and anything else capable of stabbing, cutting, piercing or puncturing any body part — have been slowly increasing since 2016, with 2,139 hospitalizations in 2023-24, versus 428 for shooting-related assaults and injuries, according to Canadian Institute for Health Information data tables.

Seemingly daily, we read or hear about stabbings. On Tuesday night, a 45-year-old woman died after a stabbing in a quiet, upscale neighborhood in a Windsor, Ont., suburb.

Of Ottawa’s first four homicides of 2026, three involved fatal stabbings, two of which were a week apart. London, Saskatoon and Vancouver’s first murder victims of the year were also killed in knife attacks.

In January, a man in his 60s was stabbed in Toronto’s east end after refusing to give his assailant, a perfect stranger, a cigarette. The same month saw non-fatal stabbings in Sarnia, Brantford and at a Toronto GO station. In February, five people were taken to hospital, three with life-threatening injuries, in a multiple stabbing in North York. Weeks earlier, an Edmonton man was stabbed during a break-and-enter at his home at 6:30 a.m.

A Jewish woman in her 70s was stabbed in the stomach last September in Ottawa’s largest kosher grocery store by a 71-year-old stranger who’d posted vile antisemitic content online.

A month later, in October, four people survived a series of unprovoked random stabbing attacks along Vancouver’s Yaletown seawall in broad morning daylight. In the same city a year earlier, a man in his 70s was killed and another man’s hand severed in another random stabbing attack by a stranger. Meanwhile, a second-degree murder trial has begun into the horrific stabbing death of Paul Schmidt, who died amid puddles of his own blood in 2023 after being stabbed by a stranger on a Vancouver Starbucks patio in front of his fiancée and three-year-old toddler. He’d reportedly asked his alleged assailant to stop vaping near his daughter.

The street stabbing violence has spilled into hospitals: a man waving a machete and uttering death threats terrorized staff at a Port Moody, B.C., hospital last year. The same year, two emergency room workers were stabbed, one seriously, in a knife attack at Halifax’s largest hospital. In London, Ont., more than 1,450 knives have been uncovered after a weapons detection system went live last April at two hospital sites. In Montreal, “huge knives” and sometimes hatchets have been seized at the city’s Notre-Dame Hospital since detectors were parked at the ER entrance on Christmas Eve, hospital security guards told CBC.

Meanwhile, in schools, battles once fought with fists are now being fought with “bladed weapons,” Longueuil Police Chief Patrick Bélanger recently told reporters. In Vancouver, a teen was stabbed and seriously injured in February in a brawl that broke out after a high school basketball game. Two weeks earlier, a 16-year-old was taken to hospital after being stabbed while sitting on a parked bus outside a Calgary high school, a targeted attack stemming from a dispute between two teens.

Most chilling are rampage-style killings: Last November, a 20-year-old Sri Lankan international student was sentenced to life in prison for the stabbing deaths of a mother and her four children, the youngest just two-and-a-half months old, in their suburban Ottawa townhouse in March 2024. Also killed was a family friend, the lone survivor the injured father, in what police would later describe as a scene of unspeakable horror. Court heard how the killer, running out of money and failing his college course, decided to “bash out” at the family that had given him a home.

Two months before the Ottawa slayings, an 18-year-old woman was killed and multiple others injured by her brother in a stabbing spree on Manitoba’s Hollow Water First Nation. In September 2022, Myles Sanderson, who was on statutory release, killed 11 and injured 17 in a mass stabbing on the James Smith Cree Nation and the nearby town of Weldon.

A coroner’s inquest heard that, in addition to his targeted victims, Sanderson, who died in police custody from a cocaine overdose, went after whoever tried to stop him.

‘I’ve been stabbed … I need someone to call 911’

Emergency medicine work demands control of one’s emotions. You need sharp, calm and critical thinking in the moment.

“I’ve been stabbed, I need a towel, I need someone to call 911 and someone needs to go help Scott — Scott’s got the guy,” Woods told the neighbouring couple whose door she had run to. Then she walked past them into the foyer and lay down on the cold tile floor.

The man rushed to help McKenzie subdue Timko, who, by this time, was face-down on the driveway on his stomach, his jaw broken, his face bloodied and swollen. Desperate to get to Woods, McKenzie ran into the garage, grabbed a hockey stick and told his neighbour that if Timko tried to move, “swing it like a baseball bat.”

McKenzie went to Woods, followed a few short minutes later by Derek Langlois, an off-duty paramedic, neighbour and friend who’d been alerted to the attack by his wife. Woods, still on the floor, remembers seeing Langlois’ flip flops. At this point, she could also feel something very bad happening, an increasing and burning pain in her abdomen. Timko had lacerated her liver, an organ on the right side of the body. The blade came in from the left.

Langlois took over maintaining pressure on the neck. He pulled her sweater off, searching for other wounds. When the paramedics arrived, he started an IV and, using his fingers, jammed gauze inside the hole in Woods’ stomach, packing the wound to staunch the bleeding.

The police were outside when Langlois and the EMS crew carried her out on a stretcher. Timko was on his own stretcher. Langlois recognized Timko as the older guy he’d twice passed on the sidewalk earlier that morning while walking his dog. They’d shared a “good morning” as they passed one another.

Woods begged the police to check on her kids, terrified that Timko might have hurt them, too. He’d taken them out for dinner the night before, perhaps because he knew he would never see them again. “Leave here and go get the kids,” she cried, repeating the address.

She has ridden in the back of an ambulance more times than she can count, when unstable patients were transferred from her small community hospital to Hamilton General, a big trauma hospital. It was the same drive she’d done a million times before, straight up potholed-Burlington Street.

Langlois, still maintaining pressure against her neck, called in the trauma alert as they sped toward the hospital. Once she knew he had done all he could to stop the blood flowing, Woods asked if he could do her one more favour.

She asked if he could help her record a message to her children. “And I need you to make sure my kids get it if I don’t make it.”

Death from massive blood loss

What kind of damage does a knife do when thrust into a person’s body?

The knife Timko stashed in his green backpack was bigger than a paring knife, Woods said. It had a 12- to 15-cm blade and a wide base.

Timko used it to lacerate her liver, “de-glove” her left thumb and hand of skin and slash her jugular vein. He also stabbed her in the back, chest and arm.

She lost, in total, about two-and-a-half litres of blood from her neck and liver. Had McKenzie met his friend for lunch that day, and had Langlois not rushed to stabilize her before paramedics arrived while her assailant was still on the scene, Woods has every reason to believe she would have died.

Her clothes were cut off at the hospital, and her body surveyed for wounds. Less than two hours after the attack, and only after police assured her that her children were alive and safe, Woods was taken into an operating room. She underwent six hours of emergency surgery requiring multiple blood transfusions.

Surgeons opened her entire abdomen to stop the bleeding from the liver. There’s a big vertical incision scar there today, because there was no time to be conservative. They needed as big a view as they could get. A vascular surgeon repaired the jugular vein. A faint 10-cm scar runs from the top of her neck to just above the breastbone.

Most fatal stab wounds involve a blood vessel, or organs with a rich supply of them, partly because of their thin walls and “proximity to the skin,” according to a recently published article on the physiology of stabbings.

The carotid artery, for example, a large, stretchy artery that feeds blood to the head and neck, is about a millimetre thick and sits two to four centimetres beneath the skin.

The protective capsule that wraps around the liver, an organ with a robust supply of blood vessels, is only a few centimetres below the skin. Once penetrated, death often results from massive blood loss.

Most serious stabbing injuries, which have increased in Ottawa over the past decade, involve the neck, chest and abdomen, “areas where you can have a lot of bleeding,” said Dr. Ayesha Zia, an emergency doctor at The Ottawa Hospital.

Particularly deadly are any injuries in the “cardiac box,” a square that runs from nipple to nipple, and from the bottom of the breastbone to the sternal notch where the neck starts. Any hole in that area and you immediately fear for the heart.

Dr. Chad Ball has fixed a bunch of stabbed hearts in places such as Cape Town, South Africa, and Colombia. Gunshots to the heart create too much damage. “The holes are too big and the patient bleeds to death very, very quickly,” said Ball, a trauma surgeon and professor in surgery and oncology at the University of Calgary. If a stab wound to the heart makes a big enough hole, people will also die before they get to the hospital. “If it’s a smaller hole, you may have enough time.”

Not long ago, Ball led a trauma response when a call came in that paramedics were en route with a 22-year-old who had been stabbed in the chest at a Calgary LRT station. He was attacked after refusing to hand over his wallet.

There was a hole inside that cardiac box.

Quickly, a bedside ultrasound was done, to check for fluid outside the heart but inside the pericardium, the sac the heart sits in. Any fluid, “and you assume there is a hole in that heart and blood is leaking into the sac,” Ball said.

The problem is that the sac isn’t super flexible. “If too much blood leaks out, it compresses your heart from the outside, and the heart can’t function and beat normally.” Meaning, it will stop. “The person will arrest.”

Ball quickly cut between the ribs, opened the chest, and cut through the pericardium to release the blood and decompress the heart. Then, with Ball holding his finger over the hole in the heart, the patient was rushed to the operating room to stitch the hole closed.

Ball, co-editor-in-chief of the Canadian Journal of Surgery, said it’s his experience, as well as that of his colleagues and police officers he’s spoken with — and there are always cops in the ER — that the number of stabbing injuries is rising.

Not necessarily the severity, but the volume.

A weapon of opportunity

What’s driving it? How to make sense of violent knife crime? And what can we do about it?

While most murder victims are young men killed by other men, women and girls are mainly killed by someone they know. Between 2011 and 2021, police in Canada reported 1,125 gender-related homicides of women and girls — killings committed by a man who was an intimate partner or family member of the victim, or who committed sexual violence as part of the killing, or who killed a sex worker.

Most, 66 per cent, were killed by an intimate partner, 28 per cent by a family member, five per cent by a friend or someone they knew and one per cent by a stranger.

The largest proportion, 34 per cent, died by stabbing.

In domestic attacks, men kill with whatever is closest at hand, which, in the home, is most often a knife.

Then there’s the impact of narcotic abuse, whether methamphetamine or fentanyl or crack cocaine “or combinations of all of the above,” Ball said. “The amount of drug use that’s evident in our patients has gone up, tremendously,” and illicit drug use increases the chances of interpersonal violence, of someone being a victim, perpetrator or both.

Males are more at risk of engaging in knife violence in public, and females in domestic settings. In the rare cases where women kill their partners with knives, the act is often precipitated by years of abuse. For both sexes, knives can often be weapons of opportunity, such as those used in the Vancouver attacks. It’s whatever tool the person had within reach in moments of anger or reactive violence.

Random stabbings, especially, seriously unnerve the public. It terrifies us to think we could be taken by surprise, and that we’ve lost all control — “that this can happen to us anytime no matter what we do to be careful,” said criminologist Yvon Dandurand. “You look around and think, who’s going to come at you with a knife? It’s not necessarily the kid with the gold chain and tattoos.”

Psychotic or anxiety disorders increase knife use. So, too, do gang affiliation, delinquent peers, alienation, low self-esteem and being a witness to or victim of violence.

The Canadian data so far do not seem to correlate attacks to ethnic groups, Dandurand said.

In an Ontario study, only a weak association was found between living in a marginalized community and knife violence.

One analysis involving young, white British males found that young men who carry knives do so as a “legitimate response both to potential threats and to the lack of protection provided by authorities.” It noted that most young men don’t appreciate that rather than lowering their risk, knives increase it.

In Canada, switchblades or any knives that can open with a button, flick or gravity are illegal. So are butterfly knives, knives with two handles that rotate around the blade, and push daggers. Otherwise, it’s legal to carry any knife that can be bought at a hardware or department store, unless it can be proven the person was carrying it with the intent and purpose of threatening or injuring someone. Then it becomes an offence.

Some have called for tougher restrictions on the sale of knives, such as Manitoba’s recently introduced Long Bladed Weapon Control Act, which has imposed stricter age verification checks for the purchase of edged weapons — knives, swords, machetes — that have a blade at least 30-cm long with a cutting edge or sharpened point.

Some have called for the phasing out of pointed-tip kitchen knives for safer, round-tipped knives. “While public debate has centred on zombie (a bladed weapon with serrated edges) and other ‘status’ knives, the most prevalent homicide weapon is a kitchen knife,” the British researchers wrote in the journal Crime Science.

Dandurand believes knife violence needs to be framed and addressed as a social problem. “The better solutions are making it safe for youth to grow up in our cities and society.”

Programs in school that teach kids how easy it is to kill with a knife, and not just “scare” or “defend,” might also help, said the authors of the paper on the physiology of stab wounds.

Training bystanders how to reduce the risk of someone dying from massive bleeding, whether from a stabbing, shooting or car crash, before paramedics arrive can also help save lives. “Stop the Bleed,” a campaign initiated by American surgeons in response to the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School In Connecticut in 2012, when 26 people, including 20 children, were gunned down by a mass shooter, teaches people the basics in how to control bleeding through direct pressure (like the towel Woods held firmly to her neck), wound packing and applying a tourniquet. Some hospitals, such as Toronto’s Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, offer free public courses.

In addition to applying pressure, never — as horrifying as it can be to see someone with a knife sticking out of them — remove a blade that’s still in the wound, said Zia, the Ottawa emergency doctor. “You can cause more damage as you retract the weapon.”

Without help, people can die from uncontrolled bleeding in as little as four minutes.

“Even with a heart injury, if the patient gets to the hospital without dying, we’ll usually get them through,” said Ball, the trauma surgeon.

“Not always. But almost always.”

The aftermath: constant fear

On Dec. 10, 2024, Allan Timko pleaded guilty in a St. Catharines courtroom to a single count of the attempted murder of Julie Woods, a surprise, “premeditated, unprovoked and vicious” attack, the judge said in delivering his sentence.

“It was through her good fortune that she is not dead, and that was also fortunate for you,” Ontario Superior Court Justice Paul R. Sweeny told Timko in court that day. The then-71-year-old was sentenced to eight years, less time served in custody, as well as credit for some mitigating circumstances while in jail, such as having to sleep on the floor, or lockdowns. He’d lived a “pro-social life,” up to the day he tried to kill Woods. He “expressed his remorse here in court. He has apologized,” the judge said.

Timko’s net sentence in the end: 2,053 days. Just over five-and-a-half years.

“I have no explanation for it,” he said in court that day about his actions. He told Woods he’d acted alone, and that he still had “Christian love in my heart for you.”

Julie Woods often listens to the voice recording she made in the back of the ambulance the day Timko tried to murder her. She didn’t want her kids to be frightened by it. “They’re not going to hear me scared, they’re not going to hear me sad,” she remembers thinking.

“I thought, ‘OK, if this is the end, that’s terrible,’” Woods said. “I had a great life — the best kids, so many wonderful people. I tried to make a positive difference in the world. I wanted my children to know I was proud of them, that they were the very best part of it.”

Sirens can be heard in the background of the message she recorded to her children that day.

She’s holding off sharing it with them until they’re older.

Woods has nightmares. She can no longer work in emergency medicine, a field she loved, because of the damage to her hand. Surgeons sewed her hand back together, but the tightness in the web space makes tasks that require dexterity — stitching wounds, inserting a breathing tube — difficult.

That’s the physical fallout. The psychological fallout has affected her ability to concentrate and focus. She has to double-check everything, every medication she orders. Everything takes much longer to do. “There’s no way I could safely run an ER.”

She panics when she sees a man who looks like Timko, even though “my brain knows it’s not him.” She recently got a German shepherd puppy.

She worries society as a whole “underplays when family violence happens against a woman. I think a lot of people blame the woman. ‘She must be difficult.’ I was carrying on a normal life and people didn’t know what a stressful divorce was happening behind the scenes.”

She’s angry about the impact Timko’s actions have had on her children. “How do they recover from this? I can’t fully recover from this betrayal of trust and I’m an adult. They’re just children. They loved him.

“How do they reconcile that, ever? How did he ever, ever think they would be OK?”

She wants mandatory-minimum prison sentences for knife violence, the way there are mandatory-minimum penalties for attempted murder with a firearm, or manslaughter with a firearm, or “causing bodily harm with intent” with a firearm.

In 2008, then-Conservative MP Gord Brown introduced a private member’s bill that would have created mandatory sentences for knife homicides, to correspond directly with killings with firearms, a bill motivated by the death of Andy Moffitt, 23, who was brutally stabbed to death in 1998 after trying to break up an Ottawa bar fight. Brown, whose bill never passed, died of a heart attack in 2018, at age 57.

Timko has a parole hearing scheduled for May, at which time he will be eligible for day parole. Without parole, he will be free in two years under mandatory release.

“I don’t know how I’ll live without fear in a world where he’s out of prison,” Woods said.

“I worry that he’ll come back to finish what he started. I worry that he’ll come to do it again.”

Only next time, she might not be so fortunate.

Main image: Dr. Julie Woods at her home in Grimsby, Ont. Portrait by Peter J. Thompson/National Post