by Gary Gimmock
Ottawa Citizen
On the day the 11-year-old boy finally broke loose from his chains and escaped his Kanata basement, his abusive father called 911 to report him missing.
It was a call for help, but it sounded more like a confession.
In the Feb. 12, 2013, 911 call, the boy’s father, a Mountie, said he had come home to find the front door open and his son gone.
“I hit him hard … I did bad things to him. I regret it,” he told the operator.
In cross-examination of the Mountie on trial for torturing and starving his son, Ottawa Crown attorney Michael Boyce used the accused’s own words to firmly establish that he knew he had done something wrong. So much so, that he expressed regret in the 911 call and later in a police interview.
“You knew all along. You knew what you were doing was wrong,” the prosecutor charged.
The father, 44, is mounting a not criminally responsible defence, saying he suffers from PTSD and didn’t have the capacity to form intent, let alone know it was wrong.
“I didn’t know what the hell I was doing,” the Mountie testified.
The former counter-terrorism investigator told court he was in a “deep fog” and didn’t appreciate the “gravity” of how he had mistreated his son. “I did not think or rationalize. Things were about me and my pain,” he said.
The Mountie, now suspended, told court that his 911 call was a “duress call,” saying: “I felt my life was in danger.”
The boy went to live with his father after his mother died in 2009. The Mountie said it turned his life upside-down.
“He was out of control from the minute he walked into our home … these changes exhausted me. I was overwhelmed. It just drained me,” he said.
He thought his son was an enemy who had invaded his “private life” so he started forcing him to sleep on the basement floor at age seven.
In his own mind, he told court he thought he was doing right by his son. “I loved him. Somewhere along the way, I had no touch of reality.”
The disturbing punishments intensified after the boy refused to do homework, and over time, the Mountie started chaining and handcuffing his son in the basement next to a slop bucket for a toilet while the rest of the family went about their daily routines upstairs.
He also burned his son’s genitals because he thought the boy was possessed. He also prayed, and enlisted a priest to help cast out his son’s demons.
The prosecutor also used the accused’s February 2013 police interview with seasoned detective Sgt. Tracy Butler to show he was well aware it was all wrong and, as a police officer, he knew it was against the law.
In the videotaped statement shown in court, the boy’s father said he had run out of options to punish his son for “lying and stealing.”
“I wasn’t doing this to destroy him. I didn’t do this to take him away from the world,” the father told police.
Butler asked about burn marks around the boy’s genitals. The father apologized: “I’m sorry … I hate myself for it.”
On the day he escaped his Kanata basement, the boy weighed only 50 pounds and CHEO doctors said he almost starved to death.
He presented himself in court again Thursday as a victim of a “vindictive” son, who had “always rejected me.” He said the child never pitied him for his own troubled childhood in war-torn Lebanon, where the father was raped as a boy. He said his son was a stranger to him, and worse, reminded him of a sexually deviant childhood friend.
“I had an enemy in front of me,” he said.
The boy’s father and stepmother, both free on bail, are each charged with aggravated assault, forcible confinement, and failure to provide necessities of life.
The father has testified that his wife, the boy’s stepmom, never witnessed any of the abuse. In a 2013 police interview, the stepmom told detectives she felt guilty for not protecting the boy. The parents are prohibited from communicating while on bail and both are still wearing their wedding rings.
There is a publication ban on the names of the accused and the priest to shield the identity of the boy.