Scarborough resident celebrates Pride after surviving shooting, beating for 'being gay'

Growing up in Jamaica, Toni Greaves was a "tomboy," a cricket player, and someone who was never afraid to be herselfeven though being herself as a lesbian meant facing death threats and discrimination.

But things took an even darker turn on Dec.23, 2007.

After getting aseries of threatening text messages about her relationship with another woman, Greaves was shot multiple times. The attack punctured her lungs, injured her bladder, and left herrelying on a wheelchair after her six-month hospital stay.

Then, a few years later, she was attacked again this time, after gettingin a car accident.

"I was beaten on the scene because I was gay," Greaves says. "That's when I decided Jamaica was no longer a place I wanted to be."

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Since 2013, the 31-year-old has called Canada home instead. And on Wednesday night, the Scarborough resident shared her harrowing story publicly for the first time at a fundraising event for Rainbow Railroad, theorganization that helped Greaves flee Jamaica for a new life.

The Toronto-based grouphelps persecuted LGBT people around the world from countries throughout Africa, the Caribbean, and the Middle Eastescape their situations and find safe haven, including many who wind up in Canada.

Torontogroup helped 81 LGBTpeople flee persecution in 2016

In 2016, Rainbow Railroad fielded more than 600 requests, and helped 81 LGBT people flee state-sponsored persecution and discrimination, according to its annual report.

A focus right now, saysexecutive directorKimahliPowell, is the situation in Chechnya, where reports surfaced earlier this year of an anti-gay crackdown in the Russian republic that's in the southernmost part of eastern Europe.

Powell, who recently visited the area, says the situation is actually worse than the notion of one large concentration camp that's circulated in media reports.

"There are many different types of detention, lots of different types of coercive tactics used to get people into situations where they were physically assaulted, electrocuted, humiliated," he said.

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But he stressed that Chechnya is just the latest headline,while LGBTpeople face discrimination every day in spots like Nigeria, Jamaica, Syria, and Uganda.

"We do this work all year round, all around the world," he said.

For Greaves, that work of a dedicated group of Canadians helped bring her to Canada. She and her girlfriend had gotten Canadian visas, but even after selling all their possessions, they couldn't afford the plane ticket out of Jamaica. The team from Toronto was able to arrange emergency travel funds to get them safely out of the country four years ago.

Now,Greaves says she has a completely different lifeone that she plans to celebrate throughoutToronto's Pride Month.

"We can just be ourselves," she says."We can get married, have a family. All that stuff we can't do in Jamaica,we can do it here."