A coroner's inquest examining the death of a mentally ill man who died in a Central East Correctional Centre in Lindsay, Ont., in 2016 heard from a former inmate who claims he saw four police beating Soleiman Faqiri before he died.Frank Gunn/The Canadian Press
A former prisoner at the Central East Correctional Centre in Ontario told police he witnessed four guards violently beating Soleiman Faqiri moments before Mr. Faqiri was declared dead at the jail, a coroner’s inquest learned on Tuesday.
Police interviewed the former prisoner, John Thibeault, in 2019, but he declined to attend the coroner’s inquest examining Mr. Faqiri’s death, citing security reasons.
The five-member inquest jury viewed a recording of his police interview, presented without any opportunity for cross-examination.
Jurors had previously heard several eyewitness accounts of the death from people employed by the jail in Kawartha Lakes. Mr. Thibeault’s recording was the first eyewitness account from someone who wasn’t an employee.
Mr. Thibeault said that on the afternoon of Dec. 15, 2016, he had been asking correctional officers for a regularly scheduled dose of methadone when he heard “chains clinking down the hall.” He looked out the window of his segregation cell and saw four correctional officers leading a handcuffed prisoner in dark-coloured shorts.
He would later learn that the prisoner was Mr. Faqiri. Earlier testimony revealed that Mr. Faqiri had been experiencing an acute psychotic episode since being admitted to the jail on Dec. 5.
Jail documents and witnesses told of how he’d been yelling in his cell, pretending he was a tiger and flooding his toilet. He had smeared feces on his body and cell walls. Both correctional staff and health care workers had alerted the jail’s chain of command about his condition and the need to get him to a psychiatric hospital.
Ten days after his admission, however, he remained at the jail. Mr. Thibeault said that as officers were leading Mr. Faqiri down the hall, one of them appeared to say something in his ear, causing him to become upset.
“Whatever they said it got him agitated where he didn’t want to go in the cell,” Mr. Thibeault recalled.
Previous video evidence showed that one of the correctional staff, a manager named John Thompson, had tried to strike Mr. Faqiri as they were heading down the hall. Another officer then pepper-sprayed Mr. Faqiri as the group rushed him toward his cell, B-10.
Inquest jury sees video of Soleiman Faqiri’s final moments at Ontario jail
Mr. Thibeault said that once the officers got Mr. Faqiri in his segregation cell, which measures roughly 8 feet by 16 feet, they started beating him.
Mr. Faqiri, hands cuffed in front of him, never tried to fight back, he said, but rose from the ground at least twice and ran into one of the cell walls. One officer dispensed a second dose of pepper spray, most of which appeared to enter Mr. Faqiri’s mouth, Mr. Thibeault said.
“They were all over him like pit bulls, like sharks,” he said, adding that officers punched Mr. Faqiri countless times. Once they’d subdued Mr. Faqiri on the floor, an officer put his knee on the prisoner’s neck, Mr. Thibeault said, at which point other prisoners in the segregation unit began banging on their cell doors.
“I’ve seen some vicious fights and I’ve never seen anything like that before.”
When one officer noticed Mr. Thibeault watching the struggle, he sprung from the cell and closed the shutter on Mr. Thibeault’s cell door, blocking the view.
Later on Tuesday, Ontario’s chief forensic pathologist, Michael Pollanen, itemized scores of injuries found on Mr. Faqiri’s body as part of his review of the postmortem examination.
“None of these injuries was individually fatal, but together they were significant contributing factor,” he said.
Dr. Pollanen found another significant co-factor in the heart. Mr. Faqiri had a condition called cardiomegaly, typified by an enlarged heart and a thickening of the left ventricle. He likely had the condition for years without experiencing any problems, but cardiomegaly can trigger a heart arrhythmia (irregular heartbeat) when placed under significant stress.
Around the time of his death, Mr. Faqiri’s heart was coursing with fight-or-flight hormones, caused by pepper spray, physical injuries, significant exertion, worsening symptoms of schizophrenia and a face-down restraint position that can lead to asphyxia (suffocation causing causing unconsciousness or death).
“No single factor here explains death,” Mr. Pollanen said. “But it’s a combination, a perfect storm of all these individual co-factors.”
The inquest is scheduled to continue through Friday.
Patrick White