Mental health pivotal to case

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This article was published 22/07/2018 (2305 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

For months, the people closest to Junior Sesay knew something was wrong. Nothing they did — calling the police, taking him to the hospital, reminding him to take his medication — stopped him.

Now, Sesay awaits a court decision on whether he’ll be held criminally responsible for an extremely violent attack that mental-health professionals should have seen coming, a forensic psychiatrist says, questioning why the former university basketball player wasn’t hospitalized before he could harm anyone.

“He was becoming desperate, and he had tried the things, and most of the family and friends had tried the things that they should do, and that’s trying to get help for somebody they saw — they were frightened what the potential was for (his) behaviour,” said forensic psychiatrist Dr. Jeffrey Waldman. “It seems like a failure of the system that it didn’t prevent this from happening.”

Waldman testified for the defence during Sesay’s attempted murder trial this month. Today, provincial court Judge Brian Corrin will hear lawyers’ arguments about whether Sesay should be found guilty for trying to kill Lena Wenke, his brother’s girlfriend, or whether he is not criminally responsible for flying into a rage and stabbing her with a kitchen knife more than 70 times.

“What he was really doing was attacking somebody that had no intent to harm him at all, but his symptoms left him unable to appreciate that that’s what was going on. He had a completely different version of reality at that time because of his illness,” Waldman said.

Once considered a rising star on the basketball court, Sesay had been accepted on teams in Winnipeg, British Columbia and Alberta, but he bounced around and was kicked off rosters after getting into fights with teammates, expressing concerns about bullying and dealing with tremors that caused his hands to shake.

“He was OK, he was fine. Playing basketball. He was doing well at school. He was having friends. Things just changed,” his mother, Phebean Hollist-Sesay, testified in court.

He moved back in with his mother early last year, at 21, and by then he was suffering from paranoia, prompting his mother to call police on him several times because she was afraid of what he might do. On the weekend leading up to the vicious attack, Hollist-Sesay left her home more than once because she was afraid to be alone with her son.

Along with acting paranoid, Sesay became violent. He smashed the television and broke things around the house. On the advice of Winnipeg Regional Health Authority professionals who assessed her son during a trip to the Crisis Response Centre, his mother removed knives from the home — all but one, a small one she used for cutting vegetables. He was prescribed medication that seemed to calm him down when he took it, but still his paranoia got worse.

He couldn’t put it out of his mind that people he knew were talking about him in a group chat, making fun of him and his tremors, trying to get him to kill himself. He talked to them about it, tried to get them to stop, but they told him they didn’t know what he was talking about. His torment continued, and in May 2017, he talked more and more about the group chat and about “taking down” the people involved.

The group chat wasn’t real.

Sesay’s gradual, insidious onset of paranoia was really a kind of psychosis, a symptom of his schizophrenia, Waldman testified, and the group chat was his main delusion.

Sesay had previously confronted 20-year-old Wenke, a Wesmen basketball player at the University of Winnipeg, about what he believed was her participation in the group chat. Repeatedly, he asked his brother William, Wenke’s boyfriend, to talk to her about the group chat. Junior’s obsession with a group chat that nobody else knew anything about and his apparent animosity toward Wenke led William to distance himself from his brother. Their mother wanted them to bury the hatchet, William testified in court, so he kept checking up on Junior. That’s what he did the morning of the attack, when he got home from a night shift early on May 23, 2017. Again, Junior asked him about the group chat.

“I told him I had no clue about what the group chat was or if it was even there,” William testified.

He also asked, though his brother didn’t think anything of it at the time, whether Wenke was home alone. Despite previous confrontations, Junior had never made any threats against Wenke, and William said he wasn’t afraid of his older brother.

“Never fearful, up until that point. I always knew he was my brother and I never expected him to hurt me.”

Just before 2:30 a.m., William got a call from Wenke, who told him she thought someone had broken into her house. Over Facetime video chat, William saw the panic in Wenke’s face as an intruder burst into her bedroom. He realized, though he didn’t see the man on video, that the intruder was his brother.

“Junior, stop!” Wenke was screaming. “Junior, no!”

Wenke’s neighbours at Dominion Street and Ellice Avenue awoke to Wenke’s screams and rushed to see what was happening while they called 911. They saw a young woman curled into the fetal position on the curb outside the house, covered in blood and trying to protect herself while a man stabbed and then stomped on her. One of the neighbours who testified during the trial, talked about how hard he’d tried to forget what he saw and how reluctant he was to re-live it. He needed to be mentally strong for his small daughter, he said, and now he can only hope nothing like that ever happens to her.

Wenke, who is from Germany, was put on life-support after the attack. She recovered from the multiple stab wounds, resumed her studies as a psychology major and returned to the basketball court last fall. She’s since been honoured with a national award for courage. Crown prosecutors didn’t call her to testify at Sesay’s trial.

A driver who saw Sesay crouched over Wenke assumed there’d been an accident and stopped to help, leaving his car running. At first, Sesay didn’t appear to notice him approaching, Sabir Stephen testified. But then Sesay looked up and came at him with a knife, Stephen said. He jumped in Stephen’s car and drove away, leaving Wenke for dead.

Canada Border Services Agency officials arrested him about four hours later at the Boissevain border crossing, after he’d crashed the car and walked a kilometre to the port of entry to ask for help, giving staff a fake name.

Judge Corrin must decide whether Sesay’s mental state meant he couldn’t understand that stabbing Wenke was wrong. Waldman testified it was his opinion, and that of Sesay’s treatment team, that Sesay believed it was “morally right” for him to stab someone he wrongly believed was harming him. Sesay could be found not criminally responsible for the attempted murder and break-in, but not for stealing the car, because that wasn’t part of his delusion, the psychiatrist testified.

The Crown has argued Waldman didn’t consider all of the relevant information about the case before forming his opinion — a suggestion Waldman dismissed during testimony — and is expected to argue against the not-criminally-responsible defence.

katie.may@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @thatkatiemay