FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Mother appeals for witnesses to "have a heart" as she prepares to mark murdered son's birthday

For Immediate Release
Wednesday, October 7, 2020

TORONTO — A Toronto mother will mark her murdered son’s birthday by bringing a cake to his gravesite Thursday. This will be the fourth birthday for Dylan Gill that his mother, Barbara Gill, will mark without answers into his unsolved homicide.
Dylan Gill would have turned 28 on October 8, if not for gunshots that were fired into the vehicle he was riding in on January 23, 2017. Every year, on his birthday, his mother relives the day he was murdered. “It’s like the same day, every single time,” Barbara Gill says. “It’s like I can’t stop my mind from going there.”
Gill still has the text messages she sent to her son the morning he was killed, asking if he was home from his night out, unaware that he was dying in hospital.
“This is the only child that I had,” she says. “I have to fight every single day to stay alive because I hate myself for not protecting my son. I just want to give up. But I can’t, because I whispered in his ear the day of the funeral, ‘I promise you, I will get these people. I will not stop until we get justice.’ So I have to live up to that promise.”
“It was heartless. There was no reason for it,” she says of the gunfire that took her son’s life. “He was not the type of person that was into drugs or was a gangster or anything like that. He was a very good-hearted, respectful boy.”
Gill is appealing for anyone with information about her son’s case to contact the Toronto Police Homicide Squad or, if they wish to remain anonymous, Crime Stoppers.
“I’m begging them. I’m just begging them just to have a heart, and just to feel a little bit of the pain I’m going through, trying to live day to day. Please, any information, even if it is anonymous, even if it doesn’t seem to make sense, just let us know. That one little statement that you don’t think is important, please, let us know.”

Barbara Gill and her husband will bring a birthday cake to Dylan’s gravesite at Glenview Memorial Gardens, 7451 Hwy. 50 in Woodbridge, at 2:30 p.m. on Thursday, October 8, 2020. Members of the media are invited to meet at the entrance to the cemetery at that time.

Barbara Gill asks that the media use the attached pictures of her son, including a picture of his last birthday alive, in the coverage of his homicide.

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