By Arthur Weinreb
Monday, April 23, 2007
In Canada we can be thankful for a lot of things. One of those that comes to mind is that out of the millions and millions of immigrants that have been welcomed to this country over the years, Cho Seung-Hui was not one of them.
Had Cho ended up in Canada instead of roaming freely around the campus of Virginia Tech, he may very well have been locked up in a mental health facility. If that had accomplished nothing else, it would have helped the 23-year-old no doubt become more Americanized. His keepers would have taken him out to a ballgame and bought him peanuts and Cracker Jacks, if in fact he had decided to hang around
Last Tuesday, five staff members of the Whitby Mental Health Centre took 13 patients to the Rogers Centre to watch the game between the Blue Jays and the Boston Red Sox. During the game one of the patients, Mylvaganam Vaasuhan, 31, wandered away from the group, supposedly to have a cigarette. He never returned.
Whitby Health Centre justified the outing as being "a series of steps towards independent living" that is "gradual in nature"; pretty standard psychiatric jargon for justifying leaving the grounds with 13 patients and returning with 12. And the institution naturally didn't think that he was an escape risk. Vaasuhan is a paranoid schizophrenic and his condition is controlled by medication. Naturally he left home without it.
The big news was not that Vaasuhan was a mental patient who was allowed to walk away from the "staff". It was that in 2001 he had been found not criminally responsible for sexually assaulting two 8-year-old girls in a Toronto park. And he is still considered to be dangerous.
According to a spokesperson from the Whitby Mental Health Centre, Toronto police were notified as soon as it became apparent that Vaasuhan didn't think that Gustavo Chachin's pitching was worth hanging around to watch. But according to police, they did not receive a call until 1 a.m. the following morning, well after the game and after the staff and remaining patients returned to the facility. Toronto Police then issued a news release stating that they "are concerned for the safety of the public, particularly young children".
Luckily a 22-year-old woman walking through the Eaton Centre the next day recognized the man sitting on a bench as the one whose picture she saw in the media. She notified mall security, who in turn called police and Mylvaganam Vaasuhan was returned to Whitby. It appears at this time that he did not commit further offences during his brief fling with freedom.
It's hard for the ordinary layperson to comprehend exactly why going to a Blue Jays-Red Sox game is necessary for successful reintegration into the community. Perhaps no one can be fully rehabilitated without watching Big Poppy swing the bat or being able to see Manny Ramirez' hair blowing in the wind without the prism of a camera lens. But it is shocking that people like Vaasuhan who are considered dangerous to the public, especially to young children, can be taken to crowded public venues like the Rogers Centre and then so loosely supervised.
The Whitby Mental Health Centre, in what only can be described as arrogant and condescending, held a press conference. After a spokeswoman moaned on about how the Centre is concerned with the safety of its residents, staff and the general public (in that order), she merely regurgitated the information that was already made public in the news release issued by the Toronto Police Service. The spokeswoman then turned her back on the assembled scribes and walked out of the room, refusing to answer any questions. Of course the media were interested in such facts as why someone who was considered so dangerous was allowed to go to the Rogers Centre and how he managed to escape. They wanted answers but all they got was the finger.
What is surprising is that after Vaasuhan was found, the story disappeared almost as quickly as it had begun. There was virtually no sign of the outrage that should have been seen after someone who sexually assaulted two little girls was allowed to go to the Rogers Centre and then walk away from the staff. In a country whose national pastime is not baseball but holding public inquiries, no one seems particularly concerned about how this type of incident can be prevented from happening again and whether or not action will be taken against the staff who watched Mylvaganam go bye-bye.
Perhaps it just seems so trivial compared to the mass murder of students and staff at Virginia Tech the day before. Or maybe it's just life in the big city.
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