Mutuir Rehman, the young killer who lost his mind on Innes Road after a staggering 18 months in solitary confinement, has won an out-of-court settlement from the province for  failing him.

Prison staff fed him through a hatch, and beyond the odd 20-minute visit from a relative, Rehman, just 22 at the time, spent his days absent human interaction.

Rehman was at the Ottawa-Carleton Detention Centre awaiting trial on a charge of second-degree murder for the 2013 stabbing death of André Boisclair.

He started hallucinating in his lonely cell, and, in the end, lost his mind.

“He looks like he’s losing his brains,” his father, Habib Rehman, told this newspaper in 2016.

The younger Rehman’s now-settled lawsuit claimed that nobody at the jail recognized or reported his deteriorating mental health. In fact, it was his defence lawyer, Dominic Lamb, who flagged it after his client was incapable of giving instructions about the case.

At the request of Lamb, Rehman was transferred on Jan. 15, 2016, for treatment at the Royal Ottawa Mental Health Centre, where he was diagnosed with an acute episode of schizophrenia. In a March 23 assessment report, a psychiatrist said Rehman appeared to be hallucinating during their interview sessions. Rehman said the hallucinations started in segregation and he reported no prior history of hearing voices or medical problems.

The psychiatrist’s report was drawn from medical records, Ottawa police reports, interviews with Rehman and a Royal social worker’s conversations with family.

In one interview, Rehman appeared to have delusions and grinned while talking about the murder case against him.

Rehman was found unfit for trial and the psychiatrist linked his deteriorating mind to his 18 months in solitary confinement.

After getting treatment at the Royal, Rehman’s mental state improved enough for him to plead guilty to manslaughter.

(His successful treatment at the hospital was intense and he was subjected to “chemical restraining”, in which patients are restrained and administered drugs to suppress aggression.)

He had repeated experiences where he reported that slain rapper Tupac was talking to him.

Revelations about Rehman’s ordeal were first reported by this newspaper in 2016. Rehman launched a $500,000 lawsuit against Ontario’s jailhouse authority in 2017. It was recently settled out of court after successful negotiation by lawyer Lawrence Greenspon.

“The length of time he spent in segregation was an outrageous violation of the Mandella Rules,” said Greenspon, referring to the UN standard for a 15-day limit in solitary. (UN studies say anything beyond that can cause psychological and physical harm.

The lawyer said the case screamed for a civil remedy and reported that his client now has a second chance with a bank account full of money waiting for him when he finishes serving his eight-year sentence for the 2013 killing.

Greenspon would not discuss details about the confidential settlement.

Ontario’s jailhouse authority has declined in the past to say why Rehman was kept in solitary for so long and refused to say if then-correctional services minister Yadira Naqvi knew about the length of time the killer spent in isolation.

Rehman’s case “epitomizes the reason why the whole system of solitary confinement is under review,” said  Greenspon.

Rehman, who was just 22 when he landed in the jail, had a chaotic childhood. By the age of 10, he was getting high. Once good with numbers, he eventually dropped out of school and started selling crack. But his hardened street life hadn’t prepared him for his time at the jail on Innes Road, where he was shown a solitary confinement cell as punishment for fighting with inmates and guards.

He spent 23 hours a day for 18 months in isolation, with no access to newspapers, TV or radio.

gdimmock@postmedia.com

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Ottawa Senators assistant general manager Randy Lee intends to plead not guilty on Friday to his latest harassment charge and set a date to file a motion to dismiss the entire case against him.

Lee, 56, was scheduled to appear in Buffalo city court  Friday morning on the new harassment case involving a teen.

The longtime Sens executive was arrested on May 31 after a 19-year-old hotel shuttle driver complained of unwanted sexual advances.

Lee was in Buffalo for the NHL scouting combine at the time. He called the Westin Hotel shuttle van from 716, a sports bar, and asked to sit in the front passenger seat, according to the police report.

The new count of harassment involves the same complainant from the same incident.

Lee, who is also general manager of the team’s AHL club, was suspended after this newspaper reported details from the Buffalo police report.

The teen driver had already told Lee to stop touching his shoulder when he started rubbing it, according to the young man’s sworn statement to police.

Lee offered to massage parts of his body and then “tried to get (the teen driver) to look at his groin area because he had an erection,” according to the police report.

On Friday morning he was to formally face a second charge of harassment with the hopes of getting a date for his lawyer Paul Cambria to file a motion to strike down the case.

Lee was handcuffed, fingerprinted and spent a night in jail until he was arraigned on June 1 on the first count of harassment involving the teen.

That same day, the young driver got a temporary protection order banning Lee from the hotel or communicating with him.

The teen’s family has retained a civil lawyer with the hopes of suing the Ottawa Senators. Lee, who remains suspended until the outcome if his case, has told this newspaper that he would love to tell his side of the story but has been advised against it.

The harassment charges, both violations and not crimes in New York, have not been proved in court.

The district attorney has told this newspaper that he seeks justice for teen but won’t ask for jail time.

Lee’s lawyer, Cambria, has told this newspaper that he will defend his client vigorously and has chalked the whole thing up to a misunderstanding.

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Neil Joynt, a long-serving OHL billet with links to NHL stars, has won a bail extension while he awaits his appeal on convictions for sex crimes against children.

Joynt, a once-prominent figure in the junior hockey world, is required to live with his wife, a well-known physician, at their Kingston apartment.

The disgraced gym teacher is prohibited from being around children under 16 unless in the presence of their parent, according to his bail conditions. (Also, the parent must be aware of Joynt’s bail conditions.)

Joynt, now 77, was sentenced to eight months for the indecent assault of two boys in the 1960s and 1970s who were not hockey players.

The disgraced gym teacher was spared a longer sentence in light of his age and health.

His bail expires on Oct. 22, when the convicted sex offender is required to surrender back into custody.

If Joynt doesn’t surrender on that date, he and his wife would lose the $10,000 each they pledged to secure his bail. They were not required to pay a deposit.

The retired Kingston gym teacher is also being sued for $4.8 million. The statement of claim, filed in Ontario Superior Court, says Joynt used his position of trust and power to sexually exploit a vulnerable boy in the 1970s.

“Joynt developed and perpetrated a plan to use his position as a teacher to sexually abuse (the plaintiff) for his own sexual gratification,” the statement of claim says.

“The conduct of Joynt was calculated to deliberately destroy the self-confidence, self-esteem, and self-worth of (the plaintiff) and was therefore reprehensible. Such conduct is offensive to the ordinary standards of decent conduct in the community and ought to be deterred with condemnation and punishment,” according to the claim filed by lawyer Christopher Edwards, who is representing a man whose identity is shielded by a court order.

One of Joynt’s victims was molested as a boy after a night of drinking on a fishing trip in the early 1970s.

The alleged victim gave his statement to Kingston police back in January 2000, when he was 39. He says he was ashamed and, fearing others would find out, told only his mother about what had happened to him. She agreed not to tell anyone, he says, so long as her son stayed clear of the gym teacher.

In his statement to police, he said Joynt started paying attention to him after his parents separated and his father left town.

The day after the sex attack, the boy spent the day fishing with the teacher and two other men. He told police he wanted to scream about what had happened, but instead stayed silent. He kept thinking about jumping out of the boat but never did, according to his police statement. On the second night of the trip, he said, he refused to drink with the men and made different sleeping arrangements.

The man said he finally went to police because he thought of his nephew and told the detective he worried about the boy’s future “when I think about my past.”

A publication ban that shielded Joynt’s identity was lifted in 2014 after this newspaper addressed the court, and entered a supporting letter from a victim who wrote that he, too, wanted the ban lifted.

A judge told the court at the time he expected the police would want the identity of the accused made public in case there might be more victims.

Joynt has always denied his sex crimes, once telling this newspaper that he doesn’t know why “Those boys made up stories about me that are untrue some 40 years later.”

In the civil suit against him, Limestone District School Board is also named as a defendant.

Joynt taught at the now-closed Calvin Park Public School in Kingston and is the longest serving billet in OHL history, having boarded hockey players for 33 years.

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Sometimes a police case can have all the markings of a solid investigation only for it to fall apart in court.

In the case against Tyler Brazeau — tried for a vicious July 1, 2015 home invasion of a paraplegic who was beaten within inches of life — Ottawa police had plenty of evidence, circumstantial and real, right down to his prints in an apartment he said he’d never been inside.

Brazeau even admitted that he lied to police twice, saying he didn’t know the victim. The judge didn’t buy his alibi and said his testimony didn’t have the ring of truth.

In fact, the judge branded Brazeau as a good liar.

Still, the Crown’s case failed in court because prosecutors couldn’t put Brazeau in the apartment on the day in question, Canada Day, 2015, around 12:45 p.m.

In a recent decision by Ontario Superior Court Justice Pierre Roger, Brazeau, 25, was acquitted of aggravated assault, robbery and break and enter.

In letting Brazeau walk, the judge noted that the victim in the case could not remember the attack. However, under cross-examination by defence lawyer Natasha Calvinho, the victim said he presumed Brazeau was guilty from the outset because he had been charged by police.

Calvinho’s cross-examination also revealed inconsistencies in the victim’s testimony to the point that the judge said the victim, at times, refused to concede even the obvious.

One example the judge gave was that the victim — a low-level dealer — said he did some drug deals in his apartment, yet refused to agree that his customers would know he kept weed at his apartment.

The judge said the victim’s explanation was baffling.

The case came down to a simple question: Was Brazeau inside the apartment at the time of the crime?

Brazeau was one of three men charged in the home invasion. The other men, both his friends, pleaded guilty but refused to identify the third accomplice, exercising their right to a code of silence.

Brazeau at first lied about knowing the victim or ever being inside the paraplegic’s apartment. He admitted his lies in court and revised his story, saying he in fact knew the victim and had been to his apartment in the past to buy weed. (His prints were found on a mason jar that the victim kept his weed in, but Ottawa police were unable to date the prints.)

The judge said the victim’s testimony left a lot of unanswered questions.

“Consequently, despite the fact that the accused lied to police and despite the fact … there are facts that connect the accused to the crime, I am nonetheless not satisfied beyond a reasonable doubt that the accused’s guilt is the the only reasonable inference that be drawn from the evidence,” Justice Roger said.

Brazeau, who has no criminal record, has always maintained his innocence and is looking forward to a fresh start.

“Justice has prevailed. The judge saw the issues with the Crown’s case and confirmed his innocence. It is a heavy burden for a young man to have spent months in custody when he was innocent. He is still a young man who can put this terrible incident behind him and move on with his life,” his defence lawyer Calvinho said.

The victim suffered serious injuries in the attack and was listed in critical condition at the time. After emerging from a medically-induced coma, the victim was transferred to a brain rehab clinic.

gdimmock@postmedia.com

PEMBROKE — Driven by jealousy, Michael Vitello hatched a plan in January 2017 to abduct, gang-rape and kill his wife in a gruesome conspiracy that included dismembering and freezing her body parts before feeding them into a wood chipper.

The disturbing plot was foiled when a would-be accomplice warned Vitello’s wife — from whom he had recently separated. She called Ontario Provincial Police.

In Pembroke court on Friday, a judge found Vitello, an Ottawa construction worker, and his childhood friend, Salvatore Raia, a school janitor, guilty of conspiring to kidnap, sexually assault and murder Vitello’s wife.

Court heard that the pair had drafted the plot over coffee on Jan. 19, 2017. They later assembled a toolkit for rape and murder and agreed to disassemble the woman’s car and sell it part by part over time.

Vitello and Raia disagreed on how to render the woman unconscious, with Vitello favouring a Slugger baseball bat (seized by police) and Raia saying he’d use his fists. They intended to rent a wood chipper to make their evil plan “far less messy.”

Vitello had met his estranged wife a few years earlier, when she was a dancer at The Playmate in Vanier and he was a regular at the club.

A baseball bat is enclosed in an evidence bag for the trial of Michael Vitello. Gary Dimmock/Postmedia

The court record shows they dated, fell in love and spent seven years, off and on, together. The first year was fun, but Vitello’s temper got ugly. He demeaned her, telling her she was useless and stupid. His anger and threats were so unbearable, she eventually took up residence at a shelter.

Vitello promised to change and she moved back in with him on the condition he would see a therapist, which he did.

But things soon got worse between them. As as she got ahead in life, he resented her for it, and blamed her for his sad lot in life.

“She became increasingly frightened … She begged him to see a doctor. She could not bear her life with him anymore. He had become extreme in his conduct,” Ontario Superior Court Justice Colin McKinnon said in his guilty decision Friday.

Some of her favourite things started going missing: Her favourite clothes, her good running shoes, jewelry, and family photographs.

She even lost the dog she loved after Vitello released the German shepherd on the highway near Upper Dwyer Hill Road between Arnprior and Ottawa. The dog hasn’t been seen since.

A hunting knife is enclosed in an evidence bag for the trial of Michael Vitello. Gary Dimmock/Postmedia

One of Vitello’s friends testified at trial, saying he was in a bad mood and edgy in late 2016, and upset that his wife was now living like a queen and he was down in the dumps.

Defence lawyers argued that the co-conspirators wouldn’t have had a big enough window of opportunity to execute the disturbing plot, but the judge disagreed.

“One thing is certain, Michael Vitello was insanely jealous (of her). On all of the evidence there is ample reason to believe he wished to kill her. His deteriorating work habits, his increasing drinking and obsession with (her) all point to the inevitability of what occurred on the morning of January 20, 2017, namely a serious and gruesome plot to kidnap, sexually assault and murder her,” McKinnon told court.

Vitello’s wife left him for good on the morning of Nov. 7, 2016, when her car wouldn’t start. (Vitello had poured sugar in the gas tank.)

The co-conspirators set out to the woman’s townhome, but did such a clumsy job of it that they were spotted in a nearby parking lot and also driving by — once with Vitello ducking down after someone saw him.

His wife, at this point, asked one of Vitello’s friends what was going on, and he warned her that she was in danger of being kidnapped.

She called the OPP and Vitello and Raia were arrested and charged. The third, would-be accomplice who warned her about the plot testified against Vitello and Raia at trial.

The judge called the witness honest to a fault and praised him for sounding the warning bell.

“Thankfully, (the witness) had a conscience and warned the victim, thereby saving her life. For that action, he must be congratulated.

Raia presented himself as a bystander but court heard incriminating evidence — notably that he got upset after his sister told police that he had asked her to pick up some of his belongings from Vitello’s — including a balaclava and hunting knife, both seized as evidence in the conspiracy.

Vitello and Raia sat quietly in the prisoner’s box on Friday as the judge delivered his verdict. They are expected to be sentenced later this year.

gdimmock@postmedia.com

Duct tape in an evidence bag for the trial of Michael Vitello. Gary Dimmock/Postmedia

It’s one thing to click the like button on Facebook, but quite another to show up in person for a Canada-first, anti-immigration rally on Parliament Hill.

The Mounties and Hill security didn’t need to set up all the extra barriers on Saturday because only 100 people showed up, or about 900 fewer than organizers had expected.

It would have been easy for Dan Dubois to blame the lousy turnout on the 31 C heat, but he didn’t. 

“I’m disappointed. The response on social media seemed bigger,” said Dubois, the 58-year-old national president of the Canadian Combat Coalition, or C3 as the self-described Canadian patriots call it. “I was expecting 1,000. Canadians are complacent. No wonder Canada is going down the tubes.”

Dubois, standing on a platform made of three wooden skids as he addressed the small anti-immigration, anti-Justin Trudeau crowd, said it was the most “multicultural bunch of racists I’ve ever seen.”

The biggest hurdle for Dubois’ group is to strip itself from any racist links because the Ontario francophone from Sudbury insists his party is anti-racist.

Dubois warned the sparse crowd on the Hill that the “mainstream media” would do its best to cast them “as a bunch of racists.”

Dan Dubois, the 58-year-old national president of the Canadian Combat Coalition.

Dubois noted that while the crowd was small, it included all walks of life and cultures, including Hindu, Pakistani, First Nations and Chinese.

The rally was held to complain about mass immigration and the Trudeau government. During his speech, Dubois called on the government to stop giving tax money to people “who hate us” and to close the borders, and he equated mass immigration to cultural suicide, referencing Canada’s crimes against its Indigenous people.

He drew the most applause when he called Trudeau a pervert and demanded that he stop groping women. 

Dubois also called for an end to child slavery and honour killings, and said immigrants should abide by Canadian laws and values.

There were no clashes because almost no counter-protesters showed up. In fact, there were more tourists than protesters. 

The loudest protester was a man who stormed around waving a Canadian flag, screaming that all of this was “my country.”

Nick Blanche was working security at the Canada-first, anti-immigration rally on Parliament Hill on Saturday, July 14, 2018.

Nick Blanche, 35, was one of the men acting as security for the rally. “Some of us are a little more conservative in this movement. I think we should close the borders a bit more because (mass immigration) is messing up our country.”

Stephen Garvey, leader of the National Citizens Alliance, also spoke at the rally in the hope of expanding the Calgary-based pro-Canada, anti-globalist party that, in its own words, wants to restore the country’s traditional heritage, culture and values.

Garvey said he founded the Canada-first political party in the hope of saving the country from corruption, big government, taxes and mass immigration. 

Dozens of tourists took photographs of the far-right participants, many waving Canadian and Quebec flags.

Some supporters identified themselves as Soliders of Odin and others were seen wearing Storm Alliance garb.

Members of the ultranationalist, men-only anti-immigrant group Northern Guard also attended the peaceful rally in full colours.

gdimmock@postmedia.com

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A member of the ‘Canadian Combat Coalition’ protesting on Parliament Hill hands out a water bottle to a child on Saturday, July 14, 2018.

A small group of members of a variety of right-wing groups protested on Parliament Hill on Saturday, July 14, 2018.

A small group of members of a variety of right-wing groups protested on Parliament Hill Saturday, July 14, 2018.

Merrill Stalker, 92, was reported missing by Ottawa Police Service on Sunday.

Ottawa Police asked Sunday for the public’s help in finding a 92-year-old man reported missing Saturday.

Merrill Stalker was last seen driving his silver Mazda 3 (Ontario licence plate BXVA207) on Carling Avenue around 7:30 p.m.

He was described as a white male, five feet nine inches tall with a thin build and medium-length white hair.

Anyone with information is asked to contact the on Ottawa Police Services Missing Person Section at 613-236-1222 (3726) or the West Duty Patrol Staff Sergeant’s Desk at 613-236-1222 (2912).

Young and old, queer and straight, they gathered under the shade of trees at Ottawa’s human-rights monument to rally loudly against the new Ontario government’s rollback on the province’s modernized sex-education curriculum.

All had their own reasons for spending a Sunday afternoon chanting and condemning the Ford government’s return to a 1998 curriculum that pre-dates social media, same-sex marriage laws and clear consent.

In a particularly moving address to the 200-strong crowd, Amanda Jetté Knox shared the story of her daughter, who after coming out as transgender was subjected to unbearable ridicule at school and bullying online. Some classmates called her awful names and thought the girl had some kind of sickness, her mother told the crowd at the Elgin Street monument.

“She felt lost,” her mother explained.

Amanda Jetté Knox speaks to the crowd gathered at Sunday’s rally.

Jetté Knox, a writer and LGBTQ advocate, homeschooled her daughter for a bit. When she returned to class in 2017, some teachers had already started teaching the new curriculum and she was welcomed with open arms. Classmates used the right pronouns and the experience was overwhelmingly positive because she was surrounded by students who finally understood her daughter, Jetté Knox said.

She firmly credits the since-repealed curriculum for turning around her daughter’s nightmare situation.

She told the crowd that she had become terrified that students across Ontario would no longer be taught a modernized curriculum. She called on all parents to push school staff to continue to teach a modernized curriculum.

Christopher Jennings, 24, held a placard saying, “Keep kids safe. Teaching consent saves lives.”

Jennings graduated high school in 2012 and said the sex education he received was vastly inadequate.

“These conversations about continuing and expressed consent need to be included in the sex-education curriculum,” he said.

Newly-elected Ottawa-Centre MPP Joel Harden called on educators to teach the modern curriculum in defiance of the Ford government. Sounding as if he was still campaigning for office, Harden called on everyone to commit to organizing at the grass-roots level and directed them to spread the word in a way that not only pre-dated the Internet, but also social media: good old-fashioned door-knocking.

“We need to take the message to the doorsteps,” Harden said, encouraging supporters to start knocking on the doors of local ridings held by Conservative MPPS, including Lisa MacLeod, the minister of Children, Community and Social Services.

“We need a new generation of community organizers,” said Harden, who mentioned, but did not detail the sad story of Kanata’s Jamie Hubley, the openly-gay figure skater who killed himself after years of bullying at school.

The PC government is consulting to see how it will replace the curriculum that has been repealed amid outrage by social conservatives.

Ford repeatedly pledged to repeal and replace the curriculum during the spring election campaign, saying parents had not been consulted enough.

The newer sex-ed curriculum sparked controversy, particularly among social conservatives, when the Liberal government introduced it three years ago.

It was the first time the curriculum had been updated since 1998, and it included warnings about online bullying and sexting that were not in the previous version. However, protesters zeroed in on discussions of same-sex marriage, gender identity and masturbation.

Police separate two groups at a protest to changes in Ontario’s sex-ed curriculum on Sunday.

Ontario’s two largest teachers’ unions have opposed the decision to repeal the 2015 curriculum, saying parents and educators were consulted extensively before the curriculum was updated.

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Nobody likes testifying in court, let alone as the prosecution’s star witness at your brother-in-law’s murder trial.

Ottawa’s Ali Abdul-Hussein, an accessory after-the-fact in a 2006 gangland killing, feared his brother-in-law so much that he considered going into the witness-protection program but declined because his brother refused to join him in a new life under a new identity, and far removed from Nawaf Al-Enzi.

Too afraid to testify against his brother-in-law, Hussein skipped town a month before the 2016 trial and spent time in Thailand, China and Lebanon. Hussein returned to Ottawa days after a jury convicted Al-Enzi of first-degree murder and he was arrested at the airport for obstructing justice.

And on Wednesday, Hussein, 30, was sentenced to three years in prison after being found guilty of thwarting justice. In her sentencing decision, Ontario Court Justice Jacqueline Loignon noted that the countries Hussein lived iin as a fugitive were primarily ones without extradition treaties with Canada.

The judge told court that his crime was a serious one, and there were a number of aggravating factors she considered before sending him to prison. He didn’t give up his criminal lifestyle after he pleaded guilty to perjury and accessory after-the-fact in the 2006 Crips execution of Mohamed Zalal. In fact, Hussein went on to have numerous troubles with the law, including a drug-trafficking conviction for which he served a two-year sentence.

Nawaf Al-Enzi

Loignon told court that both the prosecution and defence accepted that when Hussein fled the country to avoid testifying, he feared for his and his family’s safety. The defence noted that there was a drive-by shooting at Hussein’s home.

The judge also said that while Hussein didn’t give up his criminal lifestyle, she noted the absence of one aggravating factor — there was no evidence linking his refusal to testify with the jailhouse gangland code of silence.

Loignon credited Hussein’s pre-trial custody at 1.5 for a total of 395 days, so his remaining sentence to be served is 700 days.

After she sentenced Hussein, the judge told him that she hopes he will turn the page in his life.

Mohamed Zalal, a leader of the Ledbury-Banff Crips, was shot in the back of the head while sitting in the front seat of a car, travelling east on Highway 417 near Boundary Road in August 2006. His body was then dumped in a farmer’s field near Vars.

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30

Accused killer Adam Picard has lost a fresh bid for another stay of his first-degree murder case after a judge said it had no merit, all delays were to accommodate the defence, and in a stinging comment, said you can’t ask for delays and then complain about them.

Picard, 34, had won a stay in 2016 for unreasonable delay after spending four years in jail awaiting trial for the June 2012 killing of Fouad Nayel, 28. The decision stunned Nayel’s family as they watched Picard walk out of court a free man, and even the judge who let him go said the justice system had failed everyone.

But Ontario’s appeal court disagreed with the trial judge’s interpretation of the Jordan decision and reinstated the murder charge against Picard.

(The so-called Jordan decision was issued in July 2016, when the Supreme Court of Canada said unreasonable delay was to be presumed if proceedings topped 18 months in provincial court or 30 months in Superior Court.)

After the reinstatement of the murder charge, the ex-military man filed another Jordan application, saying his right to a timely trial had again been compromised.

The motion was heard in May and in a recent decision, Ontario Superior Court Justice Kevin Phillips dismissed it, saying there was no merit to support yet another stay in the case. The judge noted that the only delays in the case were to accommodate the defence.

Submissions made by Picard’s lawyer, Michael Crystal, noted that time was needed to consider a Supreme Court of Canada appeal and to prepare for trial.

However, “Mr. Picard cannot both ask for delay and then complain about it,” Phillips said.

“I cannot see one thing that the administration of justice could have done differently to have the trial now scheduled … occur any earlier. The very next day after the matter was returned from the Court of Appeal, both the Crown and the court indicated that the matter was a priority and that any time suitable to Mr. Picard would be available,” said Phillips, noting that the only delay was to accommodate the wishes of Picard.

Picard’s legal team, led by Crystal, was granted an adjournment for more time to prepare. Picard’s legal team says he is innocent and intends to vigorously defend him.

His murder charge was reinstated after the appeal court said the case deserved more latitude since charges were laid well before the Jordan ruling, and that the delays would have been acceptable under the previous legal regime.

The appeal court also said Justice Julianne Parfett made mistakes in her trial-delay calculations.

The appeal court found that, properly analyzed, the Crown could be held responsible for only 14 months of the four-year delay, which would keep the case well within the bounds of previous Supreme Court guidelines.

Nayel, a 28-year-old construction worker, had been missing for five months when his decomposed remains were discovered in the woods near Calabogie in 2012.

Police say Nayel knew his accused killer, who is now back in jail and awaiting prosecution by assistant Crown attorneys Dallas Mack and Louise Tansey.

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Eunice “Chou Chou” Ilunga would love to have been anywhere else than in the witness box in Courtroom No. 36 under cross-examination by the seasoned James Cavanagh on Friday.

And it didn’t take long for the Crown attorney to brand her a liar.

The accused ringleader in a vicious 2015 kidnapping and sex-shame attack of a young Congolese woman that was broadcast on Facebook was a combative witness who could not recall key events.

The degrading attack was broadcast on Facebook in a series of graphic videos. The young woman, half-naked, is seen crying as she’s berated for having sex with one of the accused’s boyfriends. In another video, the terrified woman, who was allegedly kidnapped at knifepoint, is seen undressed on a bed as someone applies hair-removal cream to her pubic hair.

The accused ringleader took the stand in her own defence, and under cross-examination Friday said she had a hard time recalling events because her doctor ordered her to stop thinking for fear she could have another stroke.

“I can’t think too much because it could cause another stroke,” she said.

She couldn’t even recall her own 2002 conviction for assault causing bodily harm.

“I don’t know how to explain it. It’s a mystery,” she told court.

“I’m going to suggest that you are lying to the court about your memory,” the prosecutor pressed.

The accused ringleader said she could only recall small details that come back to her. She recalled that she had a record for fraud and shoplifting, but said she had no convictions for violence, which the prosecutor established wasn’t true.

The prosecutor said the witness had a selective memory, and one that was convenient when it bolstered her defence.

In a July 2015 lie, she told police the alleged victim opened the door to her apartment, which, as the prosecutor noted, was a lie about Ilunga having permission to enter the apartment. In fact, Ilunga testified, she actually had a key and entered the apartment without the alleged victim’s consent.

Eunice “Chou Chou” Ilunga arrives at the Elgin Street courthouse on Friday, July 20, 2018.

Ilunga told court that she lied to police on the advice of her sister.

On Friday under cross-examination, she admitted that she took photos and videos of the naked woman against her will, but denied they were taken for blackmail or out of jealous rage. The alleged victim was having an affair with the accused ringleader’s boyfriend at the time.

“I didn’t do it out of anger. I did it out of love,” she testified.

She insisted that she wasn’t trying to humiliate the naked woman in the videos posted on Facebook, and she denied kidnapping her.

Earlier in the trial, the accused ringleader also had trouble with her story about when she saw the phone video of her boyfriend having sex with the alleged victim. It is this sex video that the prosecution contends infuriated Ilunga, who admitted to slashing the alleged victim’s couch with a knife, breaking her chair and kicking the TV over before leaving the apartment.

But Ilunga says she saw the sex video in a backyard, and nowhere near the scene of the alleged home invasion and kidnapping. She also said she was confused about where she saw the video and had memory problems. She also said watching the sex video made her anything but angry. In fact, she said, it felt as if a soft breeze had calmed her heart.

Eunice “Chou Chou” Ilunga arrives at the Elgin Street courthouse on Friday, July 20, 2018.

The prosecutor declared that her story made no sense, and that she was in fact furious.

The accused said she was already angry before she saw the video.

The sex-shame attack has shaken Ottawa’s tight-knit Congolese community.

The case against Ilunga, Safi “Lolo” Mahinja, 27, and Sandrine Tomba-Kalema, 37, is anchored in videos of the attacks that court heard left the young woman fearing for her life.

In a video after the attack, the accused are seen and heard singing along to a song on the radio as they are driving away. They made up their own lyrics to Brigade’s Affaire de la rencune Rondo and by doing so documented their attack, according to the Crown.

All of the accused have pleaded not guilty to kidnapping and sexual assault in the alleged revenge plot in which a 21-year-old woman was targeted for having sex with another woman’s boyfriend. The judge-alone trial continues later this year.

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Ahmed Afrah begged for his life as the teenage lovers beat him and then chased him to death over a lousy drug debt.

It was the night of May 15, 2017, and Afrah owed money to a 16-year-old dealer operating out of public-housing units in a MacLaren Street high rise.

Inside the apartment, Afrah was first beaten in the bathroom, then in the front hall. It was a severe, prolonged beating that left the apartment walls spattered in blood.

Afrah, 18, screamed for help and begged his attackers to stop. He was then forced to sit in a kitchen chair while one of the teenagers looked around for duct tape.

Fearing for his life, Afrah made a run for it in the hopes of escaping out the balcony and scaling down to safety.

It was the 16-year-old dealer who chased him. Afrah started climbing over the balcony and lost his grip, plunging 16 storeys to his death.

These fresh details — described as horrific by Ontario Court Justice Marlyse Dumel — were revealed in an agreed statement of facts Monday when the two teenage lovers admitted their roles in the vicious beating that prompted the young man to attempt an escape from the balcony.

The pair sat in the prisoner’s box in silence as Justice Dumel accepted their guilty pleas.

The boy pleaded guilty to manslaughter and the girl pleaded guilty to aggravated assault.

He had hit and kicked Afrah in the bloody beating and she had kicked him, including once in the face. The boy faced the manslaughter charge because he was the one who had chased Afrah to his death.

The judge noted in court that this was a serious crime saying: “A man is dead and his family never gets to see him again.”

The teenagers, who are too young to be identified, are forbidden from communicating with one another until they both testify against alleged accomplices at upcoming trials.

The two, separately, and in leg shackles, swore to the agreed statement of facts in court.

The boy was sentenced to three years in youth jail and the girl was sentenced to 18 months in open custody. She has awaited trial at a group home, where she has been making great strides, court heard.

The boy awaited trial in youth jail, where he has been working on high-school credits.

The girl also pleaded guilty to breaching court conditions for communicating with her accomplice by sending him intimate photos and love letters to him in youth jail.

The girl’s mother addressed the court and firmly suggested that her daughter remain at the facility where she’s made great changes in her life.

The death of Afrah has devastated his family and Ottawa’s Somali community. Though his family didn’t file a victim-impact statement, they were in court on Monday.

Lawyers Anne-Marie McElroy and Kristin Macrae represented the boy, while Sarah Starkie and Nathalie Ferland defended the girl.

The case was successfully prosecuted by Assistant Crown Attorney Lia Bramwell.

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A young Orléans man with a history of schizophrenia was nabbed by the RCMP last month over fears he would engage in terrorism.

Abdulmuti Elmi’s episodes have landed him in trouble with the law in the past but now he’s landed on the radar of the RCMP’s counter-terrorism unit and in June he was arrested on a terrorism peace bond.

The Mounties say they feared Elmi was about to commit terrorism — notably to leave the country to wage jihad abroad, according to sworn June 11 court filings by Const. Claude Champagne.

Elmi was required to live with a surety in Orléans and abide by the routine and discipline of the home, according to court records.

But Ottawa police say Elmi ran afoul and was at large on June 22 when they charged the mentally ill man for opening a bag of chips at an Elgin Street convenience store without paying for them. He dumped some of the chips on the floor and, when asked if he was going to pay for them, said he wanted to go to jail. Ottawa police officially charged him with mischief for damaging the bag of potato chips. The police also charged him with robbery for allegedly stealing money.

Back in May — a month before he was arrested on the RCMP terrorism bond — Elmi was charged with assaulting a man with a liquor bottle. He was also charged with shoplifting at the LCBO’s big store at 50 Rideau Street.

This week, Elmi pleaded guilty to assault and theft under $5,000. He will now be subjected to a mental-health assessment before he is sentenced.

The “Fear of Terrorism Offence” requires Elmi to obey his bond conditions for up to 12 months, according to court filings.

Elmi’s defence lawyer, Jessica Abou-Eid, declined to comment.

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In the disturbing video, the severely drugged woman is seen lying on the couch, her eyes half-closed, as she raises her arms and covers her face and says, “Stop, don’t do this,” just before her head slumps back.

Serial rapist Philip Wilson is then seen taking his underwear off, and the defenceless woman is heard slurring, “No.”

The woman likely has no memory of the attack, and despite an exhaustive Ottawa police investigation that identified 14 other women who were also drugged, raped and videotaped in Wilson’s Nelson Street apartment, the woman’s identity remains a mystery.

The recording, labelled No. 0451 by police, was seized from Wilson’s own shocking collection of rape videos that anchored last year’s successful prosecution against him.

Wilson, 34, was found guilty of secretly drugging, raping and videotaping 14 women from October 2013 until his arrest on March 11, 2015.

He still hasn’t been sentenced for his crimes because the Crown attorney’s office has filed a motion to declare him a dangerous offender, which, if successful, would keep him locked up for an indefinite sentence.

But almost a year later, his 15th known victim — seen on video — remains unknown, and police fear Wilson has raped other women who have no memory of the attacks.

Police do have what’s believed to be the woman’s first name, but nothing else.

Wilson, who was described by the trial judge as narcissistic, would sometimes later send the disturbing images he had taken to his victims.

The longtime drug dealer to ByWard Market bartenders, used to slip stupefying drugs into what he called The Pink Drink — a cocktail he billed to young unsuspecting women as a keep-the-party-going drink. But there was no party, just an apartment floor, where the women lay incapacitated and unable to consent, let alone resist as he raped them while filming them on his cellphone.

The heavy drugs left them blacked out for as long as four hours, and the women were left with no memory of the attacks.

The judge also ruled that Wilson’s girlfriend, who videotaped some of the sex assaults, was a coerced accomplice who was miserably trapped in a severely abusive relationship.

Ontario Superior Court Justice Charles Hackland said during his 2017 guilty verdict that Wilson’s videos “demonstrate in a graphic and disturbing manner that the accused enjoyed sexually touching these women and taking closeup images of their genitals while they were either heavily drugged or comatose and he retained and collected these images for his own purposes. … None of the women were aware that they were being recorded and none had been asked or given permission, as the accused admitted.”

Wilson testified in his own defence at trial, claiming the women wanted to take rape drugs and that the sex was consensual.

But the judge didn’t buy his story, and flatly rejected Wilson’s testimony, saying it appeared as though he made it up as he went along.

The judge also noted that the drug dealer’s testimony was self-serving and that he had a grandiose view of himself.

Wilson testified that he respected women, but the judge set the record straight, telling court the evidence showed that was a twisted detachment from reality.

Wilson showed no outward emotion as the guilty verdicts were delivered.

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His accused killers figured Ahmed Afrah, just 18, was an easy mark — a vulnerable drug addict who owed them money. They thought nothing about slapping someone around to collect a drug debt and so, on the night of May 15, 2017, they lured him to a public-housing unit in a MacLaren Street high rise.

Once inside, young Ahmed Afrah was beaten so loudly that tenants across the hall and one a floor below could hear it over the basketball game on TV. He was beaten in the bathroom, then in the front hall. It was a severe, prolonged beating. Repeatedly hit and kicked, the apartment was now spattered in blood and Afrah was begging for his life.

Then they forced him to sit in a kitchen chair and one of them started looking around for duct tape. Fearing for his life, Afrah tried to escape out the 16th floor balcony as one of his attackers chased him. Afrah climbed out and onto an adjacent balcony and tried to scale down to safety only to lose his grip, plunging 16 storeys to his death.

This is the terrifying account of the final moments of Afrah’s life that was detailed Monday in opening statements by Ottawa assistant Crown attorney Jon Fuller in the manslaughter prosecution of Liban Gure, 30, and Daniel Jean-Charles, 22. Both men have pleaded not guilty at the judge-alone trial at the Elgin Street courthouse.

Daniel Jean Charles

Liban Gure leaves the Ottawa courthouse in Ottawa on Monday.

The manslaughter trial heard from two Crown witnesses Monday, both Ottawa police forensic officers who gave the courtroom a guided tour of the crime scene up on the 16th floor through  photos and video. In cross-examination, defence lawyer Genevieve McInnes quickly established that there’s no DNA from her client Jean-Charles that puts him at the scene.

The trial is in its early stages, but the Crown is expected to call at least one of two teenage lovers to testify against their alleged accomplices now on trial. The teenage lovers — by law too young to be identified — pleaded guilty in July to their roles in the vicious beating that ended in a chase to the death over a drug debt.

The trial judge in that case noted the severity of the crime, saying, “A man is dead and his family never gets to see him again. The young lovers, both serving sentences, are forbidden from communicating with one another until the case against their accomplices ends.”

The death of Afrah has devastated his family and Ottawa’s Somali community. His family sat in the gallery Monday on the left, behind major-crime detectives Chris O’Brien and Guy Seguin.

The accused also sat in the gallery surrounded by friends and family. They’re not in the prisoner’s box because both Gure, represented by Gary Barnes, and Jean-Charles are out on bail.

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Craig Beaton, 30, clocked out at the print shop on Slater Street around 3:30 p.m. on Friday, hit the TD bank machine, and then the store for a pack of smokes (Viceroy Red Regular), before walking to the corner of Metcalfe and Albert to catch a city bus out to Kanata for a night of drinks with friends.

Beaton could have taken either Route 61 or 269, but Route 269 was the first bus to come along. He stepped aboard, tapped his Presto card and didn’t pay any attention to the driver. Beaton took a window seat on the upper deck, just past the halfway mark on the passenger’s side. He had his headphones on and started watching a YouTube video of DJ Angerfist performing live at a festival. Beaton was trying to relax on the bus after another day at the print shop, where he’s worked for eight years.

He just kind of zoned out, he said.

Minutes later, as the westbound OC Transpo double-decker approached Westboro Station on the Transitway, his life, and many others’, took a rapid turn.

“All of a sudden, you felt a big jolt, like we jumped over a curb or something,” Beaton said Wednesday from his hospital bed in a telephone interview.

Then it got worse, much worse.

“After the first big jolt, we hit something else … must have been the bus shelter. I just saw the rows of seats pushing back towards me as the roof of the shelter started cutting through the bus,” Beaton recalled.

The seat in front of him pressed hard into his legs, breaking both instantly.

“I was trapped. My knees were pinned between the edge of my seat and the seat ahead of me. It’s probably the worst pain I’ve ever felt,” said Beaton, who said he’ll be off work for months.

“I feared that I would lose my legs for sure, due to the circulation being cut off for some time.”

It was a terrifying scene, he recalled.

“Everyone was just screaming and nobody in my row could move,” he said.

It was at that point that some passengers on the driver’s side came to their aid and “just helped us breathe” and asked if we could “wriggle free.” Then the firefighters came.

“The firefighters used the jaws of life to cut the seats away. Then they realized there were people at the back that needed help too, so the firefighters started smashing windows in the back to work at both ends of the bus,” Beaton said.

When firefighters cut Beaton free from the mangled seats, he fell to the floor and said he couldn’t walk. “I couldn’t stand.” Two firefighters carried him to a smashed-out window and he was carried down to safety by two firefighters on the outside, both on ladders propped up against the bus.

Beaton was then carried on a stretcher to a waiting ambulance bound for the Civic Hospital on Carling Avenue.

“It was just crazy. It just happened so fast. It’s just not something you expect,” Beaton said.

“I’m one of the lucky ones, for sure.”

A self-taken photo of Craig Beaton, who was on the top row of the OC Transpo bus that crashed at Westboro Station on Friday.

The fatal OC Transpo crash that claimed three lives happened around 3:50 p.m. on Friday.

Once treated and settled in at hospital, Beaton texted his mom at 6 p.m. on Friday, writing: “I was in the bus crash. I’m at the hospital.”

But Beaton didn’t say which hospital, because he didn’t know. Once he learned he was at the Civic, he told his mother, who later came to visit that night along with his father and aunt and uncle.

Beaton is recovering from two broken legs and nerve damage. He took his first few steps on Tuesday afternoon but quickly returned to his bed, saying he was exhausted after a minute of standing up with the aid of a walker.

He recalled that right after the crash the hospital was “complete chaos because all the other people from the crash were here,” and Beaton praised doctors and nurses who were “running around and going above and beyond.”

The crash remains under investigation.

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When police showed up to Mathieu Pahle’s home in 2014 with a warrant and asked him if they’d find child porn on his computer, he said “probably” and let them in.

Pahle, now 36, wasn’t your usual suspect for he came clean right away and showed police around.

But then again, most child porn criminals aren’t border agents who took police foundations in college.

The case against the former border guard is particular because he took it to trial with hopes the judge would understand that his appetite for child porn started after he was first exposed to it while stationed at a customs post in Cornwall.

“He would not be here, but for him coming across this child pornography at the border in the midst of protecting the community,” Ottawa defence lawyer James Harbic argued.

Regardless, Pahle was found guilty on one count of possession of child porn and sentenced on Jan. 7 to 15 months in jail. The judge noted the depravity and violence in some of the videos, saying the nature of the vile collection — 9,888 images — was a serious aggravating factor.

Some of the videos showed violent sexual exploitation of girls, ranging from infants to 12 year olds. A few of the disturbing videos showed a man raping blindfolded three year olds.

In her sentencing decision, Ontario Superior Court Justice Adriana Doyle highlighted doctors’ reports that concluded there is no evidence that Pahle is a danger to children and he’s a low risk to re-offend.

A psychiatric examination concluded that he was mostly aroused by adults and that his life leading up to his arrest was a complete mess.

His mother and brother had died, and he was suffering in secret from PTSD after seeing someone die in a car crash near his Canada Border Services Agency post. He didn’t tell his employer for fear of getting fired.

Then, when he was arrested for child porn, he lost his wife and his job. He now has a new girlfriend he started dating last year. She didn’t know about his case until recently, and when she found out, she stood by him.

In fact, when Pahle won bail last week while awaiting an appeal, it was his girlfriend who posted $5,000 in cash. His bail conditions require him to live at his girlfriend’s apartment in Les Coteaux, Que., roughly 150 kilometres east of Ottawa.

According to doctors’ reports filed in court, Pahle is severely depressed, hopeless and has suicidal tendencies.

A sexual behaviour report concluded that Pahle does not meet the diagnostic criteria for pedophilic disorder.

In one interview with a doctor, Pahle said he was only partly to blame.

In a pre-sentence assessment, a probation officer said Pahle’s significant history of negative events has “prevented him from a full evaluation of moral conduct, full growth, and from wholly taking responsibility for his own actions.”

The probation officer noted that Pahle didn’t take any steps to engage in a specialized sexual delinquency program.

And while the doctors reported otherwise, the probation officer had concerns about Pahle’s risk to society.

“Although there is some acknowledgement of his criminal behaviour and the deviant nature of that behaviour, Mr. Pahle has very little understanding of, and in particular, very little appreciation of the notions related to his own behaviour. Given these conditions, the probability of a risk of reoffending cannot be discounted,” the probation officer wrote.

Pahle is awaiting an appeal by his defence lawyers James and Rob Harbic. No date has been set for a hearing, and he remains on bail with the support of his girlfriend and father, who posted $10,000 in cash as a bail surety.

Pahle now works as a landscaper in the summer and in the winter he plows snow.

His bail conditions prohibit him from being around children under 16 unless another adult is present.

Pahle was also required to surrender his passport, according to the bail conditions.

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Jan Harder drove to her city hall job last week and it took two and a half hours for the full 23-kilometre trek from her Barrhaven home.

The Barrhaven councillor is at the point now where some days she doesn’t know what to tell residents about the snarled traffic and unreliable city buses that sometimes arrive late and already full with everyone else fighting to get downtown from the suburb named after a developer.

“It’s a battle every day. It’s the number 1 issue and frustration, no matter the mode of transportation. You know we need to do better,” Harder says.

Some Barrhaven residents spend three hours on an OC Transpo bus commuting to and from work downtown. (That’s just two minutes shy of the running time for the 1995 epic war film Braveheart.)

The councillor likes to joke — she still has a sense of humour in the face of this transit “torture” — that the difference between raising three kids in Westboro or Barrhaven is three hours.

But the jokes stop when the Barrhaven traffic crisis starts messing with kids’ hockey: kids are being benched for showing up late because their parents were stuck in another messy commute home from work.

“It’s not fair,” Harder says.

Some of those frustrated hockey parents were among 75 residents who attended a transit meeting hosted by the Barrhaven BIA and Harder on Tuesday night at the Cedarhill Golf and Country Club. Transit experts and the councillor addressed the crowd about solutions.

Harder squarely puts the blame on the LRT hold up.

“Make no mistake about it: the delays in LRT are choking us,” said Harder, referring to all the bus routes that have been detoured because of light-rail construction.

She’s worked hard and got more buses running in her ward, but she knows there’s no quick fix and says it’s impossible to measure the success of added buses in this year’s hard winter. But she’s getting ahead of the transit master plan and says widening Strandherd — a two-lane rural road with ditches — will help to ease Barrhaven’s traffic chaos.

Rannie MacDonald moved to Barrhaven 10 years ago. He attended the meeting and told this newspaper he can’t believe that with all the planning that went into building a Costco, that not enough planning went into the road infrastructure around it. (Harder says she expects Strandherd will be widened soon, maybe as early as March.)

“How could you ignore that? Now you’ve got this big bottleneck. It’s just amazing,” said MacDonald.

Supa Kala and Jeeva Tharmakulasingamy moved to Barrhaven in April. Supa is on maternity leave and attended the transit meeting Tuesday night. When she returns to work downtown, she’ll find out how bad it really is. Right now, she says, just running errands within Barrhaven on OC Transpo is difficult because the buses are usually late, sometimes up to 40 minutes.

In all of this traffic madness, Barrhaven residents, while frustrated, were extremely polite at the meeting and many wanted to be part of the solution.

Harder is good at rallying a community — especially when it comes to sorting out transit.

“I need all of you to stay engaged and help,” she urged her constituents.

It is the councillor’s dream to get another interchange so folks have another way of getting on to Highway 416. At the end of the day, the councillor wants to put an end to the weekday “battle” of commuting to and from work.

Barrhaven’s exploding population, now nearing 90,000, has outgrown its transit infrastructure and now everyone is scrambling to find a solution that meets the needs of a once-quiet suburb that had only grocery store in 1990.

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The last time they let Mohamad Barkhadle out of jail, he went on to be accused of even worse crimes against women — including the 2017 slaying of a single mom. Her body wasn’t discovered for 10 days and her two-year-old boy had to fend for himself in their fifth-floor public housing unit in Mechanicsville.

Once back in jail after his arrest, Barkhadle was later charged with another count of first-degree murder, this time in the April 2018 jailhouse beating of inmate Marco Michaud, 36.

Right after the killing, Barkhadle, 32, was placed in solitary confinement where he’s remained for almost 250 days, and he’s been demanding to be released back into general population ever since.

“I don’t care if people care about me, but I have rights like every other inmate. This is my cry for help,” Barkhadle said in an interview on Monday.

The accused killer likened his stay in solitary to unlawful detention and expects his Toronto lawyer to file a legal motion to get him out of his segregation cell, where he spends most days reading the Qur’an and law books. (UN experts say that anything beyond 15 days in solitary can cause physical and psychological harm.)

He’s complained to everyone who will listen, but Barkhadle doesn’t exactly cut a sympathetic figure. The crack dealer has had his share of second chances.

In October 2016, Barkhadle beat a dangerous offender designation, which would have kept him behind bars for an indeterminate sentence.

Justice Heather Perkins-McVey denied the Crown application. The judge also denied an application to brand him a long-term offender, which would have come with strict supervision once released back into the community.

The judge set him free after crediting him for pre-trial custody at the Innes Road jail. At the time, the judge said conditions at the jail were “difficult” and noted there were no rehab programs for those dealing with addiction issues, like Barkhadle.

“Hopefully this has been a wake-up call to Mr. Barkhadle, as he will be closely monitored in future,” Perkins-McVey said.

Less than a year after his release, he was arrested by police for allegedly choking and sexually assaulting a woman. He faced multiple charges, including attempted murder, for the May 2017 attack.

Not long after his arrest, Barkhadle was also charged in the killing of the mother in Mechanicsville, whose name is shielded by a publication ban.

Barkhadle pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder and in his interview with this newspaper, insisted he’s innocent, describing the victim as a longtime friend.

“She was a dear friend. I was shocked and hurt, to be honest (about the killing) … I literally didn’t do this. There is nothing saying I did it. There’s not a single shred of evidence that I did anything wrong, to be honest,” claimed Barkhadle, who declined to get into specific details about the case, saying the whole story will unfold at trial, which is not yet scheduled.

“I didn’t kill this woman … I shouldn’t be here,” he claimed.

And Barkhadle said he knew the woman’s two-year-old son who survived on his own for 10 days after his mother’s death. Police detectives and CHEO doctors were left marvelling at the young boy’s health and his will to survive.

Barkhadle also pleaded not guilty in the deadly jailhouse beating that was captured on security video.

Michaud, his alleged victim, was awaiting trial for second-degree murder and had hoped to plead guilty to the lesser charge of manslaughter. Originally from Timmins, Michaud had a record dating back two decades, with convictions for drugs, arson and robbery.

Barkhadle has been on the police radar for awhile. Police issued his photograph to the public in 2012 as they hunted for a suspect who had choked a woman during a robbery.

In 2010, Barkhadle was arrested and charged with pimping a 17-year-old girl. He was charged with procuring, living off the avails of prostitution, living off the avails of a juvenile prostitute, using violence and breach of probation.

In another set of charges in 2011, Barkhadle was sentenced to seven months in jail for what a judge described as “morally reprehensible” crimes. Barkhadle, who was 25 at the time, was found guilty of possession of a dangerous weapon, criminal harassment and breach of probation, but acquitted of intimidation and extortion.

Barkhadle remains in solitary confinement, awaiting trials for his worst charges so far — two counts of first-degree murder.

The Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services says segregation is used only as a last resort to ensure the safety of inmates and staff.

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Justice Hugh Fraser has presided over some pretty disturbing cases in his 25 years on the bench — everything from torture to kidnapping — but he’d never come across a case quite like this, nothing this depraved.

Courtroom No. 7 fell silent on Wednesday as the judge read out the facts about a young father’s “depraved conduct” that has torn apart families — still reeling in untold grief — and left a five-year-old girl facing unknown, life-altering consequences.

As the man was sentenced to five years in prison, most of the folks in the court gallery seemed to stare out blankly, as if stunned by the awful facts read out to the court. The Ottawa father, 24, admitted to grooming his five-year-old stepdaughter by introducing her to pornography before molesting her repeatedly. He filmed some of his actions on his cellphone to keep as a trophy.

Justice Fraser noted the father’s position of trust when “her ‘Daddy’ used (the girl) to satisfy his deviant sexual fantasies.”

The man — whose identity is shielded by a publication ban — was sentenced at the same hearing for breaking both of his son’s ankles. The boy was just four weeks old when he grabbed him by the ankles and violently flipped him back and forth in an overwhelming fit of frustration. The judge said the case’s only saving grace is that the boy won’t have a memory of the vicious assault.

Most of the details about the case were aggravating factors the judge had to weigh against mitigating ones — most notably the fact that the accused pleaded guilty and spared the young girl the hardship of a trial.

The judge also noted that his guilty pleas were a clear sign of remorse. The man has yet to sign up for treatment, but is willing to do so, which was also a mitigating factor the judge took into account before sentencing.

The judge also banned the man from going near public places like parks and pools where children are known to play. He’s also banned from communicating with his victims while serving his prison term. Once released, he’s allowed only to communicate with them with the approval of their mothers, and child welfare agents.

The mother of the infant son considers him a monster, telling court in a victim-impact statement that she’ll never forgive him.

And the mother of the little girl was the one who first discovered what her former fiancé was doing with her daughter. One week before their planned wedding, she found a video in his email account of him sexually assaulting her daughter.