WHY JOHN CAREEN’S DEATH SHOULD NOT BE CLOSED

Many years ago, Russell Wangersky wrote in his column in The Telegram about the death of John Careen at St. Clare’’s Mercy Hospital.

Wangersky was of the opinion the violent death must be devastating to his family but, seeing as the mentally ill and suicidal patient was a ward of the Crown, perforce it was a societal matter and thus merited a judicial inquiry.

I had been tempted many times over the years to give Wangersky a copy of the Crown attorney’s legal opinion “leaked” to me by the senior Royal Newfoundland Constabulary (RNC) officer and show him the omissions and fundamental flaws requiring revision I had noted in the document.

I refrained as those nurses tasked with providing constant nursing care to John Careen had legal rights and I did not want to be accused by some smart lawyer of trying them in the court of public opinion.

After then premier Roger Grimes appointed this province’s first citizen’s representative, my older brother and I had a meeting with the representative. He entered the meeting room with a couple of bulging file folders in his briefcase and plunked them down on the table.

I asked him if the Crown attorney’s legal opinion was among the papers. He said it was and that he was curious to know how I came to possess a copy of that confidential, internal government document.

You must understand, dear reader that he knew his way around the corridors of power at Confederation Building.

During the rest of the fruitless meeting, the topic of the written legal opinion didn’t come up. I didn’t want it to and the meeting, from my position, was about the government being dishonourable in its refusal to call a judicial inquiry.

As reported in Barb Sweet’s article on the front page of The Telegram of April 6, a Justice department spokeswoman said the file on John Careen’s death is considered closed and won’t be reopened.

All very well and everyone is entitled to an opinion.

I will remind the spokeswoman and her colleagues the Public Prosecutions Office and the RNC were instrumental in causing Newfoundland and Labrador to lead all other Canadian jurisdictions in most per capita wrongful convictions for the murder.

No doubt there was extreme reluctance to open those three files but pressure was brought to bear, retired Supreme Court of Canada chief justice Antonio Lamer presided over an inquiry and vindicated the innocent men.

If suicide is a disguised murder, that is, the murder of one’s self, how is John Careen’s death a suicide when he didn’t open the seventh floor window (the nurse who opened it is not mentioned anywhere in the written opinion) and he didn’t crash through sash and glass and screen to meet his death 40 feet below?

I have been unable to reconcile the opened window and the requirements of the Mental Health Act. Can you? Tom Careen Placentia