It took prison 11 days to kill him
Family of man fighting for accountability and dignity for people with mental illnesses
Few tragedies are as heartbreaking as those at the intersection of mental illness and incarceration.
The life of 30-year-old Soleiman Faqiri, like the lives of Ashley Smith, Pierre
Coriolan, Errol Greene, Abdurahman Ibrahim Hassan and Moses Beaver among others before him, ended at that intersection.
“Soleiman’s life was ended in the very institution that was supposed to protect him,” Soleiman’s brother Yusuf Faqiri told a room of about 50 youth at York University on Wednesday.
“People with mental illness, their lives are not cheap. They, too, have dignity, something my brother was not given.”
The story of Soleiman — or Soli, as the family calls him — has been told and retold in the Star, at the CBC and other media.
A quick recap: On Dec. 4, 2016, Soleiman was arrested for allegedly stabbing his neighbour with an “edged weapon” that left the neighbour with minor injuries.
By all accounts, Soleiman was a bright, athletic kid. He was enrolled in environmental engineering at the University of Waterloo known to take the brightest scientific minds.
Then his life’s trajectory changed. He had a car accident. Sometime in the aftermath of that accident, he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. He often struggled with taking his medication regularly. But that didn’t mean he had stopped learning. Soli, who spoke English and Farsi, picked up Arabic. “He taught my mom how to read the Qu’ran,” Faqiri said.
Soleiman had had run-ins with law enforcement. But it was usually under
Ontario’s Mental Health Act — meaning the arresting officers would take him to a doctor. This time, though, he was taken to the notorious Lindsay superjail, where he was placed in solitary confinement. Eleven days later, he died. Reports obtained by the Star in 2018 found that in the hours before he died, 20 to 30 officers were involved in subduing him. He was pepper sprayed twice, his face covered with a spit hood; his body held down with leg irons.
“It took my mother 11 years to keep him alive. It took the justice system just 11 days to kill him,” Faqiri told the audience Wednesday.
One obvious difference is that Soli’s mother loved and accepted her child as he was. The prison did not.
But Soli’s story is about more than love. It’s about accountability. His family has begun a Justice for Soli campaign that seeks accountability for this death — the family wants the prison guards criminally charged — and of the system that would ensure others don’t meet the same fate.
People with mental illnesses are overrepresented in Ontario prisons. In 2013, the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario ordered as part of what is called the Jahn Settlement Agreement that there be improvements in access to mental-health services for inmates and improved mental-health training for staff.
Soli’s case raises powerful questions about why this does not appear to have been followed.
In 2017, the Ontario Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services said it had “substantially complied” with those remedies.
An independent 99-page review by Justice David Cole in January 2018 found that there “are a number of unaddressed (or inadequately addressed) issues that continue to be troubling” in relation to placing mentally ill patients in “conditions that resemble segregation.”
“There is no excuse for officers … not having better training to manage Soli,” lawyer Nancy Charbonneau, who specializes in prison law and child protection, said in a message that was read out.
Segregation was supposed to be a last resort, but it remains a routine approach to population management including for those with identifiable mentalhealth concerns, she said.
One thing the prison guards or the system had likely not reckoned with was the depth of family support that Soli had. After months of knocking on doors with no answers — even a coroner’s report that simply said the cause of death was “unascertained” — they have sued the province for $14 million.
Wednesday’s audience, who were first shown a CBC “Fifth Estate” documentary on Soli, comprised law school students as well as Grade 10 students from neighbourhood schools who had come as part of an initiative called Law in Action Within Schools — that connects law schools to schools in the community.
“Did your view on mental health change after Soli’s death or were you always aware?,” asked a 15-year-old who can’t be named without parental permission.
It was a question that prompted Faqiri to share a story for the first time in all of his public speaking on this issue across the country.
“I made a mistake once and I called him crazy,” Faqiri said. “He went into his room and brought his medications. He said ‘Do you think I want this? This has happened to me.’
“And I broke down. I learnt very quickly not to look at him through that lens again.”