LOSING HER SON TO JIHAD
Mother speaks out over terror case
On Aug. 12, Tamara McLean took her son to lunch, bought him groceries and drove him back to the apartment where he was staying. They hugged goodbye at her car, he left and then the police arrived.
“It literally seemed like they were coming out of the trees,” she said. “There was car after car after car and officers everywhere. It was terrifying. I stood there in shock and minutes later they brought Tevis out in handcuffs.”
Tevis Gonyou- McLean was charged with threatening to avenge the police killing of Ontario ISIL supporter Aaron Driver. The RCMP also alleged there were grounds to fear he might engage in terrorism.
None of that came as a surprise to his mother. She had been trying to cope with it for several years. She had also been secretly recording her son as he spouted rhetoric about ISIL that left her afraid of what he might do.
The case ended at the Ottawa courthouse on Jan. 26 when Gonyou- McLean, 25, signed a terrorism peace bond requiring him to abide by 18 conditions, including that he wear a GPS ankle bracelet for the next 12 months.
“I wish there had been other options available to try and help Tevis but we worked within the few options we had and did everything we could to protect Tevis, to keep him alive, to prevent him from travelling to Syria and to prevent him from hurting anyone here,” she said.
Because she was a Crown witness in the case, the mother has not spoken openly until now. But in interviews with the National Post she revealed for the first time her struggle with her son as he transformed.
If last Sunday’s killings at a Quebec City mosque were the tragic end result of extremism that went unchecked, her story shows just how hard it can be for families to get help for a loved one who appears to be radicalizing.
The experience exposed McLean to the gaps faced by the growing number of parents in her situation: the almost complete lack of support for families concerned about the radicalization, and the obstacles to getting them help.
“The federal government needs to step up and take this issue of radicalization seriously,” said the Ottawa mother of four, who added she was struck by the kindness and “genuine concern” of the Muslim organizations that tried to assist.
In family photos, Tevis is a smiling boy with blond hair and big round eyeglasses. “As a child, Tevis was an adorable, loving, intelligent kid. Cute as could be. He was raised in a happy home. We never had issues with him as a child,” McLean said.
His parents split up when he was a toddler and his mother remarried when he was five. A military family, they moved around the country until arriving in Ottawa, which was where “things started to change.”
Tevis began using drugs and getting into trouble at school, she said. When she and her husband separated, Tevis went to live with his father. “Our separation was quite amicable and we lived very close by and raised the children together as parents, just not in the same home.”
Although Tevis had wanted to follow the family tradition and join the military, a kidney disorder all but ruled that out. Instead, after high school he worked at pizza shops and a furniture store warehouse. But by 2013 his parents felt he was deteriorating.
His father told police Tevis was talking about going to Syria to fight President Bashar al-Assad. When he later joined a church that baptized him in the Ottawa River, he told his mother she should be glad because he had previously planned on joining ISIL.
Then she began receiving texts from him about the New World Order and Illuminati, she said. “He was just talking so crazy,” she said. She was concerned enough to call the Ottawa Police Service, which performed a mental health screening but did not think he needed hospitalization, she said.
When his father returned from an overseas military deployment, he and McLean had Tevis picked up on a 72-hour mental health hold. They were concerned about a family history of mental illness, and thought his drug use might be affecting him.
The police took him to the hospital but he was released. “The mental health hold only served to make matters worse, and upon Tevis leaving hospital he had said he’d read the entire Qur’an and was going to convert,” McLean said.
Trying to be supportive, she accompanied him to lectures at mosques and he converted in March 2015. He told her that when he was leaving the mosque a man had offered him $ 20,000 to join ISIL, she said.
According to the Crown allegations, he later told McLean he thought he was under scrutiny because of his connections to Carlos Larmond, who had been arrested for attempting to join ISIL. Tevis and Larmond had gone to the same Ottawa high school.
He told his mother that a Muslim convert who had spoken to the press about Awso Peshdary, an alleged ISIL recruiter in Ottawa now awaiting trial, “should be killed” for speaking against the “brothers.”
Professing his hatred of Canadian society because there was no Shariah law, Tevis began talking about Jews and Masons. Upon seeing a cross on an Ottawa church, he said he wanted to kick it down and couldn’t wait to see the ISIL flag flying from local churches.
“We don’t need f--- ing peace, we need f---ing war,” he allegedly said. He talked about routes he would take to Syria and said he was moving into an Ottawa “recruiting house,” the Crown alleged. He told his mother he would wear a suicide vest but that he would not kill innocents.
The RCMP’s Integrated National Security Enforcement Team, which had taken over the investigation from Ottawa police, contacted McLean in May 2015 about being a witness against Tevis, she said.
The Canadian Security Intelligence Service came calling four months later and she agreed to help them. The intelligence officers didn’t want her talking to anyone about it — not a therapist, not even Christianne Boudreau, who had lost her convert son in Aleppo, she said. McLean had reached out to Boudreau and they had been speaking on the phone.
“There is a huge lack of support,” said Boudreau, co-ordinator of Mothers for Life, an international support network for women dealing with radicalization in the family. She said McLean was made to feel she was overreacting and she had nowhere to turn.
“She was never offered emotional support or validation. In fact, authorities were suspect of her talking to anyone outside of themselves. With all the awareness out there now, it shouldn’t be this way,” Boudreau said.
McLean began to regret helping CSIS, feeling they were using her to collect information for them. “I was getting to know people, really good people in the Muslim community, and they wanted me to report on everyone.
“I eventually stopped seeing these good people to protect them. I realized af- ter a time as well that the information I was giving them in good faith was, for the most part, not being passed on to the RCMP,” she said.
Following an altercation in October 2015, police admitted Tevis to hospital on a mental health hold but he was quickly released with no diagnosis after two friends vouched for him, McLean said. She believes there should have been a more rigorous examination.
She tried to be patient with him but it was so hard. As she recorded him, he told her he didn’t acknowledge the “man-made” laws of governments. He denounced those who didn’t share his narrow views as “fake Muslims.”
He told her there was a war between the believers and non- believers. He said Muslims were told to fight for the cause of Allah. He spoke admiringly about Osama bin Laden. He spoke approvingly of ISIL.
When she asked him if people who thought he wanted to join the Islamic State were wrong, he said that every Muslim should want to. He said an Islamic State would restore the honour of the humiliated Muslims.
He started talking about applying for a passport. He said he wanted to go to the United Kingdom, or Saudi Arabia to learn Arabic. But other times he said things about training and defending Muslims that made her think he was going to join ISIL.
“I would sit and listen and try not to let him see me shaking and then I’d go to the car and break down,” McLean said. “I was so frightened of him and so sad for him at the same time. I don’t think I’ll ever really fully recover emotionally from all of this.”
She wondered where he was getting it all from, but she doesn’t believed anyone in particular was influencing him. “I still think most of what he learned came from the Internet.” She eventually found what she believes was his Google Plus page. The profile picture was the ISIL flag.
After three failed brushes with the mental health system, afraid of him and believing she couldn’t get through to him, she stopped seeing him in April 2016. But two days after the Aug. 10 police killing of Driver in Strathroy, Ont., as he was leaving home to commit a suicide bombing for ISIL, Tevis texted her.
She got his new address and gave it to the RCMP in case something went wrong. “The apartment was nothing more than a drug flop house. It was filthy,” she said. He told her he had been using crack the night before.
They talked about Driver. “He told his mother that Driver’s death would be avenged soon,” Crown lawyer Celine Harrington told the Ontario Court of Justice. He also said he wasn’t afraid to die a martyr, she added.
McLean was forced to make a tough decision: turn her son in to the police or take the risk that he would act on the things he was saying. “I truly believe if I hadn’t reported Tevis in Au- gust that there would have been a terrible outcome and Tevis would likely not be alive now,” McLean said.
The RCMP wanted not only to prosecute Tevis for threatening but also to subject him to a terrorism peace bond, a tool police have been using to restrict those they believe may leave Canada to join ISIL and other terrorist groups.
A judge released Tevis on bail conditions, which he breached repeatedly, resulting in his re- arrest on three occasions. On Jan. 6 he pleaded guilty to two counts of violating his release conditions and two counts of mischief for damaging the GPS ankle bracelet he was required to wear. All other charges were dropped.
Three weeks later, his mother watched in the Ottawa courtroom, tears in her eyes as the Crown read aloud the things he had said that led police to seek the terrorism peace bond. His father, now retired from the Canadian Forces, was also there.
The defence lawyer, Biagio Del Greco, said the Crown’s facts were “not necessarily admitted” by Gonyou- McLean and that some of the comments had been “prodded out of him.” He said his client was struggling with drug and mental health issues.
“He’s not like a coldblooded ISIS operative,” Justice Matthew Webber said. But he said GonyouMcLean had made extremist and threatening statements that raised concerns, given events around the world. “It’s hard not to take it seriously.”
Once the hearing was over, McLean and her son were allowed to meet in a private room used by lawyers. She emerged 30 minutes later and said it had been a good visit. She had done what she thought best. The rest was up to him.
“I love my son and I want him to be well and to have a good life. I am heartbroken by the choices he has made and by who he has become. I pray he will accept the help that is out there and be able to recover from this,” she said.
“He’s not an evil person,” she said. “He’s my kid.”
I WAS SO FRIGHTENED OF HIM AND SO SAD FOR HIM AT THE SAME TIME.