Accused in rooming house death kept journal

Mark Haslett took the stand at his murder trial on Wednesday to detail a life so lonely that he stayed in his bedroom and urinated in bottles so he wouldn’t have to step out into the common lounge of his Carling Avenue rooming house and face what he believed was a roommate’s “psychological warfare.”

Haslett, 27, who has a history of mental illness, covered his window with a tarp and played video games in the darkened room for up to 30 hours at a time. He felt that Rolland (Rolly) Laflamme, 54, was taunting him with racial and homophobic slurs. In a journal that police found in his bedroom, Haslett documented what he described as torture.

That Haslett knifed Laflamme to death on Feb. 11, 2013, is not in dispute, and his lawyers, Samir Adam and Sean May, are trying to establish that their client was too mentally ill to form the intent required for second-degree murder.

Haslett testified that he was jealous of his few friends because they had big families, and he had been on his own for a long time. His father died when Haslett was 10 and his mother died a decade later.

His older sister, Jebbeh Haslett, 28, testified on Wednesday that their family life was chaotic after their father’s sudden death and her younger brother had difficult and lonely teen years. She told the jury about his consistent delusions that he was being stalked and that he constantly worried about her safety.

At first, she thought he could be telling the truth because another brother had been hospitalized after a hate-crime attack that younger brother Mark witnessed.

She later realized: “There’s something not right. I knew something was wrong … he’s not living the same reality I am.”

“It was evident that her brother was in crisis, she testified. “I knew his mental health was crumbling. He was in distress.”

Haslett grew up in Blackburn Hamlet in east Ottawa and was living in Montreal in the years before the killing. When he told family members he wanted to come back, they said he could, if he agreed to seek treatment for mental illness. Haslett’s sister and aunt testified on Wednesday that they persuaded him to go to a hospital, only to learn that he was turned away. The jury heard that hospital staff directed him to a homeless shelter downtown.

Testifying in his own defence, Haslett told the jury that he heard messages from televisions. “They have to stop messages from TV broadcasts,” he wrote in his journal.

Haslett, in leg irons and under police guard, told the jury that he was offended by his roommate’s antigay taunts. The jury has heard that Laflamme’s TV was always on. In his chilling 911 call, played for the court, the TV can be heard so clearly that the dispatcher asks who is talking.

Haslett made a audio recording of his final confrontation with his roommate about Laflamme’s constant whistling. On the recording, played for the jury, Laflamme tells Haslett to lose his attitude.

The tape also recorded the moments after the killing — including when he walked into a liquor store and drank a bottle of red wine in the aisle, and when he returned to the rooming house and was arrested.