B.C. Insider: Vancouver knife attacks spotlight issue of violent repeat offenders

Good morning.

Last week, Matt Warren expressed anguish and helplessness at not being able to do more to support a childhood friend spiralling into a severe mental health crisis.

Warren and Brendan McBride were friends from childhood until roughly the end of high school, when they mostly lost touch. So Warren was shocked and devastated last week when the friend he remembered as “always very paranoid, but never crazy” was arrested in the wake of two horrific attacks.

Last Wednesday morning, just as rush hour was building to a peak, police were called to a small downtown square to find a 56-year-old bleeding from the head and with one hand severed. Eight minutes later, police raced two blocks over to the Queen Elizabeth Theatre where a second man was attacked and died at the scene. Police said he was Francis David Laporte, aged 70.

Officers flooded downtown and, acting on a tip from a resident who noticed a man acting erratically, they arrested McBride near the Olympic Village.

Warren told reporter Andrea Woo that he and McBride went to school together in North Vancouver and had been close friends until around age 20.

“He reached out a few times in his 20s to say he was being abused, being held against his wish,” Warren told The Globe and Mail. “He had reached out to me last November to ramble about the church, demons he was fighting and that God had let him down.”

In text messages shared with The Globe, McBride told his friend that month that he was “dealing with a spiritual conflict with god, the father of perhaps the devil.”

Warren responded in a message that McBride always had a friend in him, and to let him know how he could help.

“I didn’t know he was directly a threat to anyone, but I also didn’t know who to call,” he told Andrea.

What to do about McBride’s illness seems to have been a common question, and not a rare one.

Vancouver Police Chief Adam Palmer told a news conference after the attacks that the accused man was “very troubled” and had had about 60 “interactions” with police in the past.

Court records show McBride had twice agreed with judges in recent years that he needed treatment for his mental-health problems. The 34-year-old had spent much of the last two years on probation after pleading guilty in 2022 to assault causing bodily harm in North Vancouver and again this past spring to an assault charge stemming from an incident in White Rock, a suburb south of Vancouver, last fall.

In both cases, judges ordered McBride to undergo psychiatric treatment and neither sent him to jail.

The court records do not specify what type of help he accessed or whether he was ever treated in an institution for his mental-health problems.

The day before Wednesday morning’s knife attacks, McBride allegedly violated the terms of this probation by failing to check in with his probation officer in nearby Surrey, B.C., court documents show.

Palmer acknowledged most people suffering from mental health problems will never have any interactions with police, but he said a small fraction present an extreme danger to the public and need to be kept in institutions.

“This person, in my estimation, is going to fall into that category,” he said.

Last year, reporter Mike Hager did a deep dive into why deeply mentally ill repeat offenders are so frequently able to spin through the courts, land on the streets on bail, offend again and start the process over.

Mike learned of an overwhelmed justice system where harried Crown attorneys juggle too many cases under tight, federally mandated timelines. They appear in front of judges who often lack complete information about offenders’ criminal records as they pass down punishments.

The BC NDP government and the federal Liberals have been under pressure to make it more difficult for repeat offenders to commit further crimes. But the solutions are not as simple as opposition politicians might suggest: In 2022, B.C.’s attorney-general issued a rare directive to Crown prosecutors aimed at increasing the number of serious offenders who are held in pretrial detention without bail, but data released by the province last year showed the new rules were not having a significant impact in persuading judges to agree to detention.

This past January, the federal Liberal government enacted a bill aimed at making it more difficult for some repeat violent offenders to be granted bail. But changing the law must be done within the confines of Supreme Court of Canada rulings, which found in 2020 that the country’s bail practices are unfair and harmful.

Premier David Eby said last week that his government is working on a plan to allow deeply mentally ill people to be forced into care. On Monday, the BC Conservatives issued a news release saying if they win government in next month’s election, “mental health facilities will be reopened and revitalized.” There were no details.

This is the weekly British Columbia newsletter written by B.C. Editor Wendy Cox. If you’re reading this on the web, or it was forwarded to you from someone else, you can sign up for it and all Globe newsletters here.