Woman was ready to end ‘toxic’ relationship
Legal documents reveal boyfriend broke several no-contact court orders
Before Darian Hailey Henderson-Bellman was shot dead last week — allegedly by her onand-off-again boyfriend Darnell Reid — a close friend says the 25-year-old had mustered the courage to end the relationship for good.
“Darian was ready to leave and (Reid) knew that,” HendersonBellman’s long-time friend Rachael said Friday.
Rachael said that on the day she was killed, Henderson-Bellman went to Reid’s home, where he’d been on house arrest since May after being charged with possessing a loaded handgun, impaired driving and breaching a no-contact order after he allegedly assaulted Henderson-Bellman last summer.
Reid, 27, is accused of shooting Henderson-Bellman and then shooting himself.
He has been charged with second-degree murder, possession of a loaded firearm and two counts of failure to comply with a release order. He remains in critical condition in hospital, according to his mother.
A series of court documents obtained by the Star this week show Reid was accused three times of violating court orders not to be in contact with Henderson-Bellman in the year before her death, including once around the time of his most recent arrest for possession of a loaded firearm in May.
According to the documents, Reid was charged with assaulting Henderson-Bellman on July 14, 2019. He was released by Halton Regional Police without a bail hearing on a promise to appear with an order not to communicate in any way with the woman.
Less than a month later, on Aug. 9, 2019, Reid was accused of breaching that order and with failure to comply with an undertaking. He was released the same day on $2,000 bail, with his mother as a surety and a continued no-contact order. He was also ordered to live at his mother’s home in Brampton and banned from having any weapons.
On Oct. 1, Reid was charged again by Halton police with breaching the condition not to contact Henderson-Bellman. He was also charged with possession of Oxycodone. He continued to be on bail with his mother as a surety, this time for $3,000, and another condition was added to his bail, requiring him to give his phone to his mother at her request.
Months later, on May 23, Reid was arrested by Peel Regional Police in Brampton and charged with several firearms charges, including possession of a loaded handgun, as well as impaired driving and breaching the court order that banned him from possessing a weapon. He was driving a 2019 Mercedes C300 at the time, according to the court documents.
Following this arrest, Reid spent six days in custody and was released on $20,000 bail after a bail hearing in Brampton court on May 28. Details of the bail hearing are under a routine publication ban that will expire at the end of the court case.
According to the release order, Reid now had two female sureties, including his mother. He was ordered to be in the Brampton residence he shared with his mother at all times, except if he was with his sureties. He was also ordered to wear a GPS ankle bracelet and was banned from driving and having any weapons.
After Reid was released by a
Brampton justice of the peace on May 28, he was arrested by Halton police and charged with breaching the no-contact order with Henderson-Bellman for the third time, over alleged contact that occurred on May 22 and 23 in the town of Halton Hills, where Henderson-Bellman lived with her grandparents.
May 23 is the same day as the alleged firearms and impaired driving offences.
The court documents do not indicate whether the two incidents, which occurred in two different police jurisdictions, were connected.
Reid was released by a Milton justice of the peace on May 29 on a second $5,000 bail, with his mother as his surety. The same GPS monitoring terms and weapons ban as his Brampton bail were included, along with a continued no-contact order with HendersonBellman.
Police found Henderson-Bellman shot dead in a Brampton home at Fairglen Avenue and Deerpark Crescent at about 2:30 p.m. on July 28. Reid was also found in the home suffering from gunshot wounds.
“He had a no-contact order, so he was not supposed to be around her,” Henderson-Bellman’s mother Michelle Jones told the Star. “She still wasn’t protected.”
Rachael, who didn’t give her surname out of fears for her safety, said she and HendersonBellman have been friends since their teen years at Georgetown District High School and that she would often stay at her place.
Rachael said Reid and Henderson-Bellman continued to see each other despite the nocontact order and that it was hard to keep them apart. She described her friend as being stuck in a “toxic” relationship — which police said had lasted about three years — but was finally ready to end it.
Research by Ontario’s Domestic Violence Death Review Committee and other researchers has established that women are most at risk of being killed when they are leaving an abusive relationship.