Man not responsible in mom’s death
Crown, defence agree accused suffered from severe schizophrenia
For 40 years, Nina Hardie and her son, Christopher, hardly ever lived apart.
After Christopher’s father, Donald, died from a stroke in 2007, it was just the two of them living in the bungalow in Scarborough’s Port Union neighbourhood.
Crown prosecutor Dimitra Tsagaris told a Toronto court Tuesday they were only people in each other’s lives.
In a rare finding Tuesday, Christopher Hardie, 40, was ruled not criminally responsible for killing his 72-year-old mother in December 2017 because his severe schizophrenia symptoms robbed him of his ability to control his actions or know why they were wrong.
After an hour-long trial — in a courtroom with an empty public gallery, except for a few visiting students — the Crown and defence agreed Hardie should not be found guilty for seconddegree murder.
“This is a very sad case of a loving mother trying to deal with her son’s mental-health is- sues,” Ontario Superior Court Justice John McMahon said.
According to psychiatric reports filed with the court, Hardie was diagnosed with schizophrenia in his late teens. He went from a high-achieving high school student with a love of ancient history to being unable to continue at the University of Toronto past the first semester.
He helped his father’s lawn- cutting business and delivered copies of Auto Trader magazine, but had been supported through the Ontario Disability Support Program since 2001.
The reports document a series of run-ins with the police and the courts. In 2001and 2002, he was charged with assaulting his father on two occasions after developing an obsession with an evangelical Christian group.
After his father died in 2007, Hardie tried to stab himself in the heart with a knife — because voices told him to do so, he said, according to the psychiatric reports.
In 2016, he was charged with assaulting his mother and holding a knife to her throat. Another family member told police Nina and Donald Hardie had tried to get Christopher to live in a group home, but he did not want to go, according to the reports.
In October 2017, Nina Hardie called the police and reported her son was “wielding a knife and acting in a bizarre manner,” according to a summary of his hospitalizations in the psychiatric reports.
She said she felt unsafe with him and he was not taking his medication. He was hospitalized under the Mental Health Act and discharged 10 days later.
“In the weeks leading up to this offence, it had seemed that Mr. Hardie was compliant with his medication and nothing concerning was being reported between himself and his mother,” according to the agreed statement of facts read to the court Tuesday.
At 2:17 p.m. on Dec. 6, 2017, Christopher Hardie called 911 and said he had killed his moth- er using two golf clubs and a steak knife at the behest of a “higher authority.”
Nina Hardie was pronounced dead that afternoon. Her cause of death was ruled to be blunt force trauma injuries to her head and face.
Hardie was charged with second-degree murder. In a video statement to police and in subsequent interviews with psychiatrists, he said the “True Highest Deity” had ordered him to murder his mother.
He said he had attacked his mother on the night of Dec. 5 after she interrupted him listening to the song “Wannabe” by the Spice Girls on the radio.
He said she had asked if he wanted anything to eat, or a coffee or tea, and asked him to turn the music down.
Hardie’s interviews, which were made exhibits in court, are punctuated with nonsensical and sometimes unintelligible references to celebrities, the lottery and the “Jurassic Age.”
At one point, he flatly told a police officer that he was more than seven-feet-tall.
Hardie was ordered to return to a psychiatric hospital and the conditions of his detention or release will be under the jurisdiction of the Ontario Review Board.