REMEMBERING JOSHUA
Sturgeon County man met tragic end
Morgan Toane tears up every time he thinks of the phone calls he ignored from his big brother.
Toane’s sibling, Joshua Stebbins, died in Asheville, N.C., on June 29, 2017.
The former Sturgeon County resident and University of Alberta mechanical engineering grad was killed after years on the streets as a homeless alcoholic living with schizophrenia.
The man charged in the fatal attack was a friend.
Months later, the trial on firstdegree murder charges is still to come and Stebbins’ family is still mourning.
“He’s never going to call me again,” Toane said. “I think of all those times I didn’t pick up.”
Despite his emotions, Toane said he tries not to live with regrets.
“I know there’s nothing I could have done to help my brother, to save his life, to change his path in life,” he said.
A COMPLEX LIFE
A graduation photo of Stebbins proudly displayed in his parents’ Edmonton home shows a young man with intense blue eyes and dark brown hair in a 1993 University of Alberta mechanical engineering graduate portrait looking ready to step into adulthood.
He looked nothing like the gaunt, dishevelled 46-year-old man in the surveillance photos from the convenience store taken hours before he died.
But the photos tell the story of a complex life.
He resided back and forth between Canada and Asheville, N.C. in the southeastern U.S.
He was intellectually brilliant, but his brain had an illness.
He was gifted at mechanical engineering, but distrustful of medical science.
He was a giant in the life of his younger brother, but at times too intense to deal with.
He had a wicked sense of humour and was a deep spiritual thinker.
While schizophrenia is an illness many are able to manage, Stebbins never found a medication that worked for him. Instead, he drank low-alcohol American beer to suppress his symptoms, which included catatonic states, auditory hallucinations, disorganized speech and behaviour, delusions, a lack of emotional expression, lack of interest and depersonalization where he referred to himself in the third person.
Addiction, combined with schizophrenia, is known as a dual diagnosis.
When his mother, Kathryn Fearnley, a now-retired psychologist, spoke with authorities in North Carolina, she asked about his criminal record. Most of his offences were alcohol-related.
A BIG BROTHER
Many diseases have ripple effects that extend beyond the patient.
Joshua Stebbins’ diagnosis hit his family like a hurricane.
While all of his siblings were half brothers and sisters or stepbrothers and sisters, he was a protective and caring big brother to them all.
His stepfather, Ken Fearnley, is a former executive director of the Greater Edmonton Foundation, a not-for-profit that helps provide seniors with secure and affordable housing.
The blended family had lived in an 800-square foot home for 15 months as they built a larger home on an acreage in Bon Accord. Ken Fearnley and Kathryn Fearnley were married on Feb. 20, 1988.
Stebbins spent three years of high school at Sturgeon Composite, graduating in 1989.
That’s where he met his friend Joanne Prodahl, who later learned of Stebbins’ difficult adult life through his obituary.
During those three years, Stebbins and Prodahl had lockers near each other and one year Stebbins’ locker was above hers. Her memories are of a tall, good-looking, “ridiculously smart” and kind young man.
Prodahl recalled a day she was particularly stressed out over a math test, in tears in the hallway. Stebbins asked her what was wrong, put her books on the ground and gave her a hug.
“Then he said, ‘This isn’t going to be your life, this math test is not going to define you,’” Prodahl said.
Looking back, she was struck by the wisdom coming from a then17-year-old man.
A FASCINATION WITH ENGINES
She wasn’t the only one who saw wisdom in Stebbins.
Morgan Toane wanted to be just like his older brother when he grew up. With a 13-year age difference, Stebbins was a role model for Toane.
“He was absolutely my hero and this person that I looked up to because he was so much older than me. When I was young he had this invincibility aura to him,” Toane said. “I wanted to do everything that he did.”
Stebbins’ mother remembers one of his first words was “lawn mower.”
His fascination with engines and a desire to design cars drove him to study mechanical engineering.
He graduated from the mechanical engineering program at the University of Alberta in 1993. Professors wanted the young man to do his masters in engineering “right now,” but he wanted life experience first and to do his masters later, his mother said.
After graduating, he moved back down to the United States to get a job with Nissan in North Carolina.
Schizophrenia ended his dream career.
Coworkers knew something was wrong when Stebbins sat at his desk with his hands folded for three weeks straight. Nissan terminated his employment.
DIAGNOSED WITH SCHIZOPHRENIA
After his dismissal, Stebbins had been at an ashram in India when his mother received a phone call from a hospital there.
Her son had been found catatonic in a hallway. Halfway around the world and hearing voices, he had been diagnosed with schizophrenia.
In her Edmonton living room, books on Carl Jung lined the bookshelves of the recently-retired psychologist. Her interest had always been in Jungian analysis and the psyche. For her, schizophrenia was a mystery.
“My adrenalin was probably coming out of my pores — it was terrifying,” Fearnley said, remembering when she first heard her son had schizophrenia.
“He’s halfway around the world and I had no idea if he could function.”
After about a two-week stay in hospital, Stebbins found his own way home.
To help him, Fearnley learned she had to let go of the shame and grief and relate to him as he was in the moment.
Ultimately, he went back to the home he had known as a young child in Asheville, N.C.
RETURN TO ASHEVILLE
Asheville, N.C., is a postcard-perfect Appalachian town secluded in the Blue Ridge Mountains with historic architecture, where the mountains are painted with pastel blooms in the spring, giving way to brilliant autumn foliage.
Fearnley had hoped he would come live in Canada where he would have better access to health care, but Stebbins, an American citizen, considered Asheville to be his home.
But like any city, there are those who face homelessness.
When Stebbins had run out of phone minutes, his friend Buford Penley allowed him to use his phone to call his family in Canada.
By that time Stebbins had accumulated more than two years and a day in prison for mostly alcoholrelated offences, so he was considered a felon and could no longer travel to Canada. Besides, he told his mom, he couldn’t deal with the cold weather and Asheville was his home.
Both Stebbins and Penley drank at Just One More where Myra Price works as a bartender.
After Price lost her brother to cancer, Stebbins filled the role of big brother for her.
Penley was a good man sober, but when he went on drinking binges he would get physically violent, Price said.
“I know Buford may have been a good person when he was sober, but when he was drinking or on drugs, he was the devil walking,” Price said.
BROTHERLY LOVE
Brothers Morgan Toane and Joshua Stebbins had a lot in common, including a passion for music.
Because they had so much in common, when Stebbins was diagnosed with schizophrenia, Toane wondered if he would get it too. He was scared by the diagnosis, but it never changed how he felt about his big brother.
Stebbins would call sporadically when he had minutes on his phone, or would borrow a friend’s phone.
“We would talk about the Tragically Hip and he would show me the latest thing he did on his bass guitar, but he also had this unbelievable depth to his personality,” Toane said.
“He was a poetic person. He would quote Gord Downie lyrics and then we would have a philosophical debate about why living with love was important, or why living with courage was important. Or how things that happened to us are all just part of a larger journey that we all just have to go through and laugh at. He had this divine sense of humour.”
There were times Stebbins would call and that sense of humour would shine through.
Other times, the conversation would be unintelligible and Toane couldn’t understand his brother. Often Stebbins would try to subdue his symptoms with alcohol. Regardless of the state Stebbins was in, he would always say, “You’re my brother, I love you, tell our mother and sisters I love them,” Toane said.
Sometimes, Toane wouldn’t pick up the phone because he had company over, or he knew he didn’t have the energy.
Toane simultaneously felt both close to his brother, but far away.
“Mixed in with this sense of love and idolatry and brotherly connection that I felt with him was this sense of distance, this chasm that surrounded him from everybody else that he loved or wanted to help him,” Toane said. “It’s like we couldn’t find him.”
CARS AND A CRASH
While it affected his relationships, schizophrenia did not rob Stebbins of his mechanical prowess. He had three scooters in Asheville with which he would tinker. Often he would take broken scooters, fix them up and re-sell them.
He would also make money doing handyman work.
Unable to drive cars, his scooters offered Stebbins a way to get around.
One night in 2014 while returning home from a construction job he was caught in a crash.
The ambling gait of three or four turtles crossing the road came up against the power of the roaring engine of a vehicle. The force of the collision between the turtles and the car forced the vehicle to veer into Stebbins’ scooter. He hit the driver side of the truck with his body, leaving him with serious injuries including a broken left arm and left ankle.
He walked out of hospital two weeks later, but his physical injuries were compounded by his mental illness.
Part pride, part extreme mistrust of doctors meant Stebbins initially refused surgery to have a plate in his arm, along with any pain medication.
Fearnley believes Stebbins’ arm was chronically infected, its healing hindered by his poor nutrition.
Those injuries took away the casual work and the joy of playing guitar from him.
The crash hastened a downward spiral.
While Stebbins once owned a home, he gave it to a former girlfriend. Unable to work, he became homeless.
JUST ONE MORE
Speaking from Asheville, Price — who does not drink — said Stebbins had a heart of gold and she had tried to set him straight. He’d be sober for a few days and go back to drinking.
“He’d cool off for a few days and get sober,” she said. “He’d be looking good, he’d take a shower, come to grips with it, then a few days later he’d be back at the gutter again.”
Stebbins would wait for Price as she closed up the bar. She’d drive him home and give him McDonald’s or doughnuts to eat.
When Price was bartending, there was a rule — no politics and no religion in the bar.
That didn’t stop Stebbins from stirring the pot for a laugh.
“He’d sit back and laugh cause he got their knickers in a wad,” Price said. “I’d be like, ‘Josh? Why are you doing that crap? Get on outta here!’ And he’d laugh.”
He would play his guitar at the bar and join in with the dancing. Price said she still has a video on one of her phones of him dancing.
Because of his injuries from the scooter crash, Price said Stebbins could not defend himself.
Stebbins was found dead at 8:24 a.m. last June 29 from blunt force trauma to his head and body behind the Sonoco gas station and convenience store in Asheville. The lean-to shelter Stebbins was living in had been demolished by his attacker.
Buford James Penley was arrested and later detained in the Buncome County Detention Facility where he is awaiting trial on first-degree murder charges.
“Whatever it was hit him, he didn’t have a fighting chance,” Price said. “He didn’t even know what was coming.”
When the trial is underway, Price said she’ll be there to make sure her “Joshy” gets justice.
“He was like my big brother,” Price said. “I had a brother and I lost my brother to cancer. I didn’t think I’d lose my Joshy, but I did.”
A MOTHER’S GRIEF
Hearing that her son had been diagnosed with schizophrenia was the first time his mother would mourn losing the son she knew.
The second came 20 years later when Kathryn Fearnley learned he had been killed.
As Fearnley sat at her kitchen table in her Edmonton home, she laid her emotions bare.
Knowing the mortality rates for people with schizophrenia, knowing the way her son was living, she had been waiting for the call that her son was dead.
Twenty years after he was first diagnosed with schizophrenia, she got the call from Price down in Asheville.
“In one way, it’s terrible and in another way it’s a relief,” Fearnley said. “It is, because, finally, he’s safe.”
She said she feels sorry for the man accused in her son’s death, who she had spoken to several times prior because he would lend Stebbins his phone.
“I feel sorry for him because he’s just bitten off a huge chunk of nasty karma,” Fearnley said.
“Grief forces you to deal with your powerlessness and I think there’s an existential shame around powerlessness that you have to come to terms with,” Fearnley said.
There will be a memorial for Stebbins at the Sturgeon Memorial Funeral Chapel, 5016 47 Ave. in Bon Accord, on July 28 at 2 p.m.
In the meantime, the family is asking donations be made to the Schizophrenia Society or an agency that supports people facing homelessness in Stebbins’ memory.
“People whose lives are not affected need to know that when they see some raggedy looking half-crazy drunk person on the street, that that’s not the sum total of who they are,” Fearnley said. “People who are affected by this, usually they have such a hard time getting past the shame and the grief.”