Ex-juror to produce angry letters to make case for trauma support

Mark Farrant, 44, remembers going through a routine whenever it was time to leave the house.

He would grab his keys and his cellphone, put on his jacket and then slip a knife down the back of his jeans.

One day, Farrant says, his young daughter looked up at him.

“Daddy, what are you doing?” Farrant recalls her asking.

He knows now it had something to do with his losing an unhealthy amount of weight, his aversion to raw meat, his choice to keep a nightly vigil in the bedroom of his four-year-old daughter and his withdrawal from his friends and family.

He knows it was connected to that time he stood in the hallway, staring at the red hand print - a finger-painting mishap his daughter had left on the wall.

It reminded him of the images of bloody hand prints on the wall he had seen in photographs shown as evidence in a courtroom. The Toronto man spent five months on the jury at the trial of Farshad Badakhshan, who was convicted in 2014 of second-degree murder in the death of his girlfriend, Carina Petrache, a 23-year-old student at Ryerson University. Badakhshan committed suicide in jail before his sentencing hearing.

It took a while for Farrant, a father of two, to realize he needed help.

It also took a while to get it. Now living with a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder, Farrant has made it his mission to make sure other jurors who need counselling and other mental health support to cope with the aftermath of their civic duty are not left, like he was, calling the courthouse and being told there was nothing anyone there could do.

After having successfully advocated for a new jury support program in Ontario, Farrant is taking his fight to Parliament Hill.

He wants the federal government to develop a national standard to ensure any juror in any province or territory has access to the same level of support.