Western Canada: B.C. to review why suspect in Vancouver Chinatown stabbing was on leave from hospital

Good morning. Wendy Cox in Vancouver this morning.

Sitting on a parole board or a psychiatric-review panel must be a special kind of stress. The decisions made there are important records of the reasoning behind whether someone should be released back into society and what conditions they should abide by. Those reasons are supposed to be public documents.

Last Sunday afternoon at Light Up Chinatown – a festival aimed at bringing happy attention to the Downtown Eastside neighbourhood that frequently has the opposite – a man randomly stabbed a couple in their 60s and a young woman. They were left with severe, but non-life-threatening injuries.

On Monday, police announced Blair Evan Donnelly was charged with three counts of aggravated assault. Donnelly had been released on a day pass from the Forensic Psychiatric Hospital in Coquitlam where he has been detained after being found not criminally responsible for stabbing his 16-year-old daughter to death in 2008.

A year later, Donnelly was out on a temporary leave when he stabbed another person.

On Tuesday, Premier David Eby said he was “white-hot angry” upon learning about the release.

“I cannot fathom how someone who murdered his daughter was released in 2009, went out and stabbed somebody else, would then be released again, unaccompanied, somehow able to go out and buy a knife, go to Chinatown and stab three people. How is that possible?” Eby said. “We’ll make sure there’s nobody else that’s on a day pass that’s in a similar situation, to ensure the community is safe.”

Thursday, Eby announced an independent review of the circumstances leading to Donnelly’s release would be conducted by retired Abbotsford police chief Bob Rich.

Eby also made reference to the April 13 review-board report that had fuelled his anger.

“At the end of the day, the core question of how a violent, psychotic individual was released into the community to attack innocent people is the question that needs to be answered,” he said.

But although the Globe and Mail and other media began asking for a copy of that review panel report on Monday, the document has still not been officially released.

Instead, on Thursday, the BC Review Board said it had received an application to “withhold” the release of the reasons. The agency would not say Friday whether the hospital administration or the accused was attempting to ban publication of the details of the decision. A spokesman for the Crown, the other party to the proceedings with the ability to apply to keep them secret, told The Globe it wasn’t the Crown and the Review Board promised to give media chance to challenge the application, though no direction was given by the end of Friday.

But journalist Rob Shaw at CHEK television in Victoria got a leaked copy and posted it online. It’s not difficult to see why a party to the case might want the reasons buried.

In April, the review board heard Donnelly “presents a high risk of relapse given his pattern of rapid decompensation and violence in the past,” one of his psychiatrists told the panel.

“The accused has reoffended after long periods of remission between violent episodes and without significant warning signs.”

The report notes that a year after Donnelly was convicted of murdering his daughter, he was given a day pass from the hospital and met up with a former patient from the facility. The two used cocaine together for several hours before Donnelly stabbed his companion,

In 2017, he was out on another temporary leave when medical staff noticed he was becoming obsessed with religious matters once again and ordered him back to the hospital, the document says. Shortly after returning, he attacked a patient with a butter knife, but was later found not criminally responsible for that assault and received an absolute discharge, according to the document.

Despite all that, the board decided in April that Donnelly could leave the facility temporarily, with the hospital director’s permission. Apparently, that permission was granted.

After a judge finds an accused person is not criminally responsible or fit for trial, the person undergoes a regular review by a three-person review-board panel, made up of a lawyer, a psychiatrist and a member of the wider community. If the person is deemed a danger to the community, they must remain in custody. But they are still eligible for escorted or unescorted visits to the outside world if a hospital director vouches for their mental health, which appears to be what happened here.

Rebecca Mayrhofer, whose brother was murdered and dismembered by another man who was found not criminally responsible, told The Canadian Press she wasn’t surprised about the details of the Donnelly case.

The man who killed her brother in 2010, Kenneth Barter, was found to have been in a psychotic state and was sent to the same hospital where Donnelly has resided. Barter was eventually able to return to the community unescorted.

Barter would be re-arrested. He was charged with assault and assault with a weapon in 2022. Those charges were stayed this year, and he remains in the community because of an absolute discharge by the review board in 2019.

Mayrhofer and other victim advocates have long sought reform of the system handling offenders deemed not criminally responsible by reason of mental disorder. She said the “system is broken” and it “desperately needs a change.”

“I don’t want to see other people go through what happened last weekend and what happened with Ken,” Mayrhofer said.

This is the weekly Western Canada newsletter written by B.C. Editor Wendy Cox and Alberta Bureau Chief Mark Iype. 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.