Dad who killed kids approved for outings

VANCOUVER — A British Columbia father who killed his three children while suffering psychosis has been granted escorted outings into the community, a privilege giving him limited new freedom seven years after the murders.

Allan Schoenborn received the B.C. Review Board’s approval even as the Crown warned panel members to heed new Conservative government legislation empowering them to hold mentally ill offenders indefinitely.

Darcie Clarke, the children’s mother, said in a statement that her family will still work with the Crown to apply to B.C. Supreme Court to label the 47-year-old a “high-risk” offender.

“This is the decision my family and I had been dreading,” she said in the online statement. “Our hope is that the Supreme Court will look at the facts without the review board bias and find Allan a high risk.”

The B.C. Review Board is governed under federal jurisdiction.

Clarke also took aim at the B.C. Review Board directly, calling on Premier Christy Clark and B.C.’s minister of Justice to review the board and its operations at the Forensic Psychiatric Hospital.

The ruling gives the hospital director the discretion to direct trained staff members to escort Schoenborn on brief, highly managed excursions into a nearby city.

A B.C. Supreme Court judge found Schoenborn was suffering psychosis when he killed his children, ages 10, eight and five, in their Merritt home. He was arrested after a 10-day manhunt in April 2008.

Schoenborn has been held in the psychiatric hospital in suburban Vancouver since being declared not criminally responsible for the killings on account of mental disorder five years ago.

Schoenborn’s treating psychiatrist said that while the man remains a “significant threat,” he is at low risk of escape and would be under constant watch.