The unexpected transformation of AARON PEARLSTON
He is now Douglas Pearson, white supremacist: ‘To take a young man with the issues that he has to face and turning his head with thoughts of Nazism is the worst kind of exploitation’
TORONTO • Douglas Pearson was clearing customs at Toronto’s island airport three years ago when Canada Border Services Agency officers pulled him aside. “I passed initial questioning, but I was split off and they looked through my baggage and found ‘hate material,’ “he wrote later.
To his surprise, Customs officers seized the Nazi reading material he was carrying back from Tennessee, where he had attended the national conference of the Council of Conservative Citizens, the U.S. racist group that white supremacist killer Dylann Roof said had fed his ideas.
“The rest they took to Ottawa where they say I can apply for its return,” he wrote online. “They said I was smuggling it in. They put me in a holding cell and told me I was to be contacted in a couple of days if charges were to be pursued. I was released and told to take the ferry home to Toronto.”
His parents declined to be interviewed, but those who have tried to help them said the family has watched helplessly as Pearson has fallen in with racist groups, contributing money to them, spouting the cause online and, in October 2012, legally changing his name from Aaron Pearlston.
In interviews, those familiar with the case said they were convinced Pearson was being exploited by the racist movement.
“It’s shameful,” said Bernie Farber, an expert on Canadian hate groups. “To take a young man with the issues that he has to face and turning his head with thoughts of swastikas and Nazism is the worst kind of exploitation anybody could possibly imagine.”
Len Rudner, director of community relations and outreach at the Centre for Israel & Jewish Affairs, also said he was aware of the case. “To take advantage of a young man who has a particular intellectual issue is, I think, pretty low,” he said. He said the family was well-known for its contribution to Holocaust edu-
He came to CAFE. We didn’t recruit him.”
Pearson was diagnosed at an early age. Focusing intensely on a topic and being rigid to changing ideas are associated with Autism Spectrum Disorders, said Dr. Jonathan Weiss, Chair in ASD Treatment and Care Research at the York University Department of Psychology.
Those with ASD may also struggle to develop relationships, and can experience isolation and marginalization. “Overall, these elements can place them at increased risk of becoming involved with groups or individuals that are harmful,” he said.
“The predisposition to be highly focused and determined is a particular strength if channelled into the right kind of productive activity, but can also place a person at risk for being involved in dangerous activities,” Weiss added. Researchers have come across a few extremists who self-identified as autistic, but it is extremely rare.
Sports used to be Pearson’s focus. “I love hockey,” he told his local newspaper in 2007, when it wrote an upbeat story about him with a front-page headline that read: “Hockey not just a pipe dream: Goalie with autism gets his chance to play AAA.”
He was 18, in his final year at Thornlea Secondary and had made the Toronto Aeros AAA team as a backup goaltender. “What makes his success special is that Aaron is autistic,” the Thornhill Liberal story reported, describing him as “an inspiration to his teammates,” who nicknamed him Bulletproof and banged their sticks against the boards whenever he made a save.
He had started playing at 13, it said. “He has a heart the size of an elephant,” his coach Mike Todd was quoted as saying. “He has the mind of a sponge. He’s a perfectionist. Anything short of perfection is seen as a total failure to him.”
A year later, Pearson was picked up by the Toronto Colts under 21 AAA team. He played forward and wore No. 42, scoring two goals and seven assists over 88 games. Coach Bruce Sturley said he didn’t play much, but was very fit and his teammates were protective of him.
“Aaron was a good kid,” he said.
He wasn’t into racism at the time, but later Pearson called Sturley about signing his passport application as a guarantor. When Sturley asked why he was travelling to the United States, the youth started ranting about the state of the world. Alarmed, Sturley called the parents, but they already knew.
“I don’t think there is any doubt that they are using him,” he said of the racist groups. “I’m sure that Aaron feels like he is one of the boys, but if you meet him you know like the rest of us he just wants to fit in somewhere.”
A resident of one of Canada’s most Jewish neighbourhoods, Pearson would spend hours on the computer. By 2012, he was writing prolifically on racist web forums, conveying the fundamentals of white nationalist ideology: blaming non-whites for crime and “clogging up the emergency wards;” abhorrence over mixed-race couples; and fear over the fate of whites in an increasingly multicultural society.
There was the nostalgia for the Nazi era; on the Aryan Nations of Missouri website, he signed off with “Hail Victory,” a Hitler-looking icon and a swastika. There was also the Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism, the disdain for Canadian laws limiting hate speech, the vision of a white Utopia, the talk of guns and revolution. He demonstrated a familiarity with the main figures in the Canadian and U.S. racist movements.
“I remember when I was in kindergarten being made to wear a Stop Racism button. I immediately knew that racism was good and I knew I didn’t want third world filth in my country,” he wrote on the Northwest Front website. “The area I’m in is a freaking hellhole.”
He said he was making $12 an hour as a timekeeper at a hockey rink (until someone “told the league that Douglas was a racist”) and was saving to move to Seattle to join the Northwest Front, which wants to establish an Aryan homeland in the U.S. Pacific Northwest.
“Yes, we’ve known about Doug for a long time,” the group’s founder, Harold Covington, said in emails. “We get that occasionally, self-hating Jews who really, really, really want to be Nazis.” Covington said he hadn’t heard from Pearson for several years. “I remember he sent me a hockey puck once, complete with Canadian customs form. I have no idea why.”
The matter eventually went to the York Regional Police hate crimes and extremism unit. The officer assigned to the case also had a son with autism, so he understood. The officer went to the house, which sits on a narrow urban lot and has a basketball net above the garage door. For 45 minutes, he spoke to Pearson, trying to make a connection, trying just to coax him out of his room. Pearson said one word: “No.”
Online, however, Pearson didn’t hold back. He asked if anyone could recommend a version of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. He used derogatory terms for blacks, South Asians, Chinese and Latin Americans. He was particularly harsh on Jews.
He has called them “stupid” and “evil.” He complained about “kike lobbying,” “ZOG” and the state of “IsraHELL.” He used terms like the “six million lie,” omitting the fact that the Holocaust claimed the lives of his great-grandparents. Only two sons survived, one of them his kindly Polish-born Toronto grandfather, Howard Chandler, who came to Canada in 1947.
Now in his 80s, Chandler has long been active in Holocaust education. He has spoken at Toronto-area schools and taken part in the March of the Living, an annual walk through the Auschwitz and Birkenau sites with youths from around the world.
Chandler said he had not spoken to his grandson for some time, but recalled them arguing over the Holocaust after Pearson claimed it never happened. Chandler pointed out that his parents and siblings had died in the Holocaust. Pearson responded that they might be in Argentina.
“How can you argue with that?”
He said the family had done everything it could, including telling border officials not to allow Pearson to travel, but that under the existing system, he was falling through the cracks.
“There is nobody that can have any control over him, he does what he wants to do. He changed his name. I know he was going to the States to these white supremacists,” Chandler said. “What I would say is, people like Fromm and people like him: if they exploit the gullible, the gullible they are exploitable, but it’s a sickness with Aaron, it is a sickness and he’s exploiting him.”
Two years ago, the family approached the Centre for Israel & Jewish Affairs.
“I was contacted by the mom,” Rudner said. “She was expressing concerns that her son had somehow found himself within the orbit of what she described, as I recall, as a white supremacist organization.”
Rudner, a former member of the York Region District School Board race relations committee, put her in touch with Jewish Family & Child Services and spoke to the police. “It became obvious that the young man was indeed travelling in dangerous circles, but there wasn’t really much that we could do about it,” he said.
“The young man was an adult and is his own agent, so to speak, in terms of what he chooses to do or not do, so he can’t be controlled by his parents, he doesn’t have to listen to his parents if he doesn’t want to listen to them.”
Some racists have given Pearson a hard time over his Jewish ancestry. One wrote online about meeting him at a Stormfront seminar in Tennessee and finding him “very Jewish looking.” Stormfront is a Florida-based web forum run by a former Ku Klux Klan leader, Don Black.
Fromm said Pearson told him about his Jewish roots and it had not been an issue.
“Not that I know of, at least not the meetings that I’ve been involved in. People maybe wonder a little bit about him, but I think he’d be fairly well accepted, you know, he’s a little intense but to my knowledge nobody has insulted him or confronted him,” he said.
But he said Pearson had never mentioned autism, and Fromm has not met the family. Fromm said if Pearson was wearing a cast, he would know his arm was broken but how was he to know he was autistic? “I don’t have a medical background,” he said. “He’s intense,” he added. “As far as I can tell he’s sincere.”
Asked if he would treat him any differently now that he knew about his autism, Fromm said, “I don’t even know what autism means. I assume he’s an adult and responsible for his own activities. I know he’s employed, he seems to be able to travel and so on. He may not be exactly the same as the next guy but … I‘m not aware that autism should require that he be treated as mentally incompetent or something.”
The murder of nine black worshippers at a Charleston, S.C., church on June 17 has brought the threat of racist groups into focus, but the Canadian Security Intelligence Service’s latest annual report calls Canada’s far right more of a threat to public order than national security, and Fromm said he discouraged violence. “I make it quite clear, there’s no double talk about this, acts of violence are a quick way to prison and you’re no use to the movement in prison.”
Pearson did not respond to interview requests sent to his online accounts, but he has written highly of Fromm in his posts, calling him “the leading Canadian white nationalist” and “the best man we’ve got in Canada.” (Fromm said he was flattered.) He “likes” Fromm’s videos on YouTube and subscribes to the channel where Fromm posts speeches on the history of the Council of Conservative Citizens and the “silent health threat” of immigration.
Any attempt to break someone with autism away from a harmful activity must involve limiting their contact to those exploiting them, Dr. Weiss said. “Without this piece, it is an uphill battle, because these outside agents are unravelling all the attempts at providing constructive alternatives.”
Hoping to nudge Pearson out of racist circles, the parents asked his former hockey coach about 18 months ago if he could put their son behind the bench, but he just couldn’t. Shown a photo of Pearson among skinheads, Sturley said he found the situation alarming.
“He looks like a lost kid in that picture.”
I don’t think there is any doubt that they are using him