Mentally challenged man beaten, tortured
OTTAWA A mentally challenged Ottawa man was stalked, tortured, kept in a dog cage and eventually left for dead in a forest following a months-long online effort to rob him of his savings and property, a court heard this week.
Lisa Woolley, 27, pleaded guilty this week in the Ontario Court of Justice to her involvement in a plot that involved the forcible confinement and robbery in early September of a 25-year-old man who, according to the agreed statement of facts, “suffers from a mild cognitive impairment” as well as a degree of autism. The victim’s name has been withheld from publication.
Woolley, of Toronto, was one of four people arrested by police on charges including extortion, robbery and kidnapping. Laura Brahaney, 25, of Ottawa, and Traevonne Mattis and Jake Hopwood, both in their late 20s and both from Toronto, remain before the courts. Brahaney also faces charges in connection with another group robbery that took place on Montreal Road on Sept. 12.
As part of her guilty plea, Woolley agreed to a “statement of facts” that reveals in grim detail how, beginning in early 2014, she and another woman used Facebook to lure a young, mentally challenged man into relationships to get money from him. On Sept. 4, the man agreed to meet Woolley but found another woman waiting at the rendezvous point. The pair went to his downtown Ottawa apartment, where they were joined by two men.
Inside, the 25-year-old was beaten and threatened at knifepoint while his home was stripped of everything from clothing and computers to a television and movies.
The conspirators then bundled the young man, bound, gagged and blindfolded, into the back seat of a car, driving him first to a gas-station pay phone to call his father and beg for “$300,000 or they will kill me” — his father didn’t answer his phone — and then to a house in Cumberland, Ont., where he was forced into a basement dog cage so small he could not stretch out.
The victim, say the court documents, was systematically taunted and humiliated. He “was not permitted to leave the dog cage and he was forced to urinate and defecate from inside it. They gave him a plastic bag to urinate in.”
The man was told his mother and his cat had been killed. At one point, he was stripped of clothing and scrubbed with a hard brush that had a metal scraper on its back. “They then used a cloth which had been soaked in gasoline and bleach and they rubbed the cloth on (his) upper body.”
The judge ordered a pre-sentence report on Woolley.