Mark Waweru, 25, of London, Ont., spent two years in a hospital for three offences committed one night in 2016. He’s part of a system that some experts say is difficult to leave and is overrepresented by Black people.
Five years ago, 20-year-old Mark Waweru, then a student at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ont., and a budding hip hop artist, had his first psychotic episode.
It’s a night that changed the course of his life and left him locked in the forensic mental health system in Ontario for more than four years — a system that Waweru and a number of defence lawyers with expertise in the field believe is overrepresented by Black people.
“The hardest thing to grasp was just the time that I lost when I could have been doing productive things in the community,” said Waweru, who is Black.
On Feb. 6, 2016, Waweru, who is now 25 and lives in London, Ont., had just wrapped up his first performance in Niagara Falls, Ont.
That’s when the night took a turn.
According to Waweru, he boarded a bus to Toronto without any money. The notes from his most recent disposition at the Ontario Review Board describe what happened next.
They say Waweru, who had no prior criminal record, threatened someone in a York University dorm room, boarded a Toronto public transit bus telling the driver he intended to rob him and told a female passenger, “Talk to me or I’ll rape you.”
Waweru was arrested as he got off the bus and charged with two counts of robbery and one count of uttering threats. After spending the night in jail, he was transferred to the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in downtown Toronto to be assessed on his ability to stand trial. He was prescribed antipsychotic medication, deemed fit for trial and released on bail after 28 days.
“My lawyer’s advice was to take a plea called not criminally responsible. It’s called NCR,” said Waweru, who as a result was then placed in the forensic mental health system. “I was under the impression if I was in the NCR system that I would not have a criminal record.”
He also thought he wouldn’t have to live in a hospital. “I was not explained these things when I went to my first board [hearing],” he said. “I didn’t know what the system was like.”
But a year after he was released on bail, the Ontario Review Board — which makes decisions on the fate of those who have been found by a court to be either unfit to stand trial or NCR due to a mental disorder — checked back in with Waweru and decided he wasn’t doing well. So he was admitted to the Southwest Centre for Forensic Mental Health Care in St. Thomas, Ont., where he was diagnosed with schizophrenia.
Waweru would stay there for two years. He was finally released, subject to conditions by the review board, on May 6, 2019.
Black people face obstacles in system: lawyer
Anita Szigeti, a Toronto lawyer and president of the Law and Mental Disorder Association (LAMDA), estimates there are 1,800 to 2,000 accused in the forensic mental health system in Ontario — and while it’s an approach that works for some, for others like Waweru, it doesn’t.
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