‘I’m going to hang myself,’ inmate was heard yelling

Hours before he hanged himself in solitary confinement at the Ottawa jail last week, Yousef Hussein, 27, was yelling that he was going to kill himself, according to an inmate who was locked up only a few cells away.

“He was saying ‘I’m going to do it. I’m going to hang myself. I don’t want a transfer. I’m comfortable here,’” said inmate Phoenix Dupras, who is in jail on theft charges and breach of probation.

“He was yelling loud enough that it woke me up,” Dupras said.

The inmate said Hussein was loudly threatening to kill himself sometime between 10:30 and 11 p.m. last Monday night. He was found dead in his cell by a guard at 3 a.m. in a segregation section of the jail known as “one wing,” where guards are tasked with checking on inmates through the window slots every 20 minutes, and 10 minutes if they’re on suicide watch.

“It’s pathetic that he wasn’t put on a suicide watch (at that time),” Dupras said.

Hussein, who was awaiting trial on sex assault charges, had been on suicide watch but had been recently taken off.

The Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services, which oversees jails in the province, said it will not release any details surrounding the circumstances of Hussein’s detention or his death as several investigations are ongoing.

In a recent interview with Postmedia, Hussein’s family said he was sent to solitary confinement for 23 hours a day as punishment for refusing a transfer to another jail to ease overcrowding. His family believes he didn’t want to lose the twice-weekly 20-minute visits from relatives or access to the two or three collect phones calls he could make each day while in general population at the Ottawa jail.

Some 71 inmates whose trials are months away were recently transferred from the Innes Road jail so some inmates would no longer have to sleep on the floor, and in some cases, shower cells.

Hussein had spent two years behind bars and was still a year away from his day in court.

No nurses were on duty when he hanged himself. Guards performed CPR on Hussein until paramedics arrived. Hussein was taken to hospital and later pronounced dead.

“How could they keep him all this time in jail without any trial?” his brother Ali Hussein recently told Postmedia. “I believe in my heart that they killed him . ... They did every single thing for him to die inside there.”

Inmate Jacques (Porkchop) Rouschop, who served time alongside Hussein in Dorm 2 (protective custody), said the man was a respectful inmate who called his family three times a day. “That’s what probably drove him crazy. No phone. He couldn’t call home.”