Might van attacker have lied to psychiatrists?
Alek Minassian’s trial is now entirely a debate on what was going on between his ears
It would doubtless shock Wayne Gretzky that his name was raised during a trial about mass murder.
But in a way, the retired hockey superstar is coin of the realm, isn’t he?
To wit, a Crown attorney was asking a psychiatrist on the witness stand why she drew inferences from minor differences in details — racial background, divorced parents — between Incel founder Elliot Rodger and the accused mass killer, Alek Minassian, from her interviews with the latter. After which the expert witness concluded that Minassian’s long-ago autism spectrum disorder made him vulnerable to becoming hyper-focused on and possibly indoctrinated by the manifesto written by the woman-hating shooter who killed six people in 2014 before turning the gun on himself.
Dr. Rebecca Chauhan had written in her report: “He explained that he identified with Elliot Rodger due to their shared difficulties in relationships with females, diagnosis of autism and experience of loneliness.
“Interestingly, he was unable to appreciate any differences between his own life and that of Rodger.”
Minassian had thought about Rodger and the manifesto daily in the months, even years, before he deliberately drove a
van into strangers along north Yonge Street on April 23, 2018, killing 10, most of the victims female, and injuring 14.
Compare that evaluation to notes read into the court record from Dr. John Bradford, renowned forensic psychiatrist, like Chauhan, an expert witness for the defence, although he’s not yet testified, who asked his colleague to see Minassian in order to confirm the diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder. She concurred.
“With some direct questioning, he did admit some level of identification with the mass murders committed by Rodger and Harper Mercer.” (Mercer was a student who’d killed nine people in Oregon in 2015.) “He pointed out, however, that, although he had difficulty with women, he did not feel as isolated as these two appeared to feel. Furthermore, he denied any feelings of anger. He then pointed out that the incident he referred to in his statement in 2013 on Halloween night did not happen.”
That was from the interview Minassian gave to a Toronto detective following his arrest, in which he recalled his fury over being rejected by females he’d approached at that ’13 Halloween party; it was but one example of his frustration with the “Stacys” of the world, who ignored “gentlemen,” such as him, preferred have-it-all “Chads,” to use a term from the vernacular of the embittered, involuntary celibate constituency.
“Does that suggest to you he was able to point out some differences?” asked prosecutor John Rinaldi.
Chauhan: “I agree he was able to show some differences. What I was referring to was more obvious differences that he wasn’t able to pick up. That Elliot Rodger had been biracial, that there had been a breakup in his family circumstance. There seemed to be some major things that you would have thought he might have picked up in terms of their background and history.”
Where is this going, you might well ask.
Well, Rinaldo spent most of his daylong cross-examination picking at Chauhan’s assessment of Minassian’s hyper-fixation with Rodger, which was informed by his autism and — this is the crux of the defence that he was not criminally responsible — that his condition rendered him incapable of appreciating the wrongfulness, morally and legally, of his actions.
Minassian has pleaded not guilty to 10 counts of first-degree murder and 16 counts of attempted murder.
“It’s difficult because these are interviews he had with other people,” Chauhan countered. “I have a hard time reading a snippet when I wasn’t actually there.”
Rinaldi: “I’m not sure, with the greatest of respect, why you would have anticipated that, when you know, for a fact, his interest in Elliot Rodgers was not whether he was biracial or anything else. His interest in Elliot Rodger was the similarities between him and Elliot, meaning his inability to have a girlfriend, his awkwardness. Those would be the things he would be drawn to. That’s what he tells you and a number of assessors. So, why did you think he would care that Elliot Rodger is biracial? I’m not understanding.”
The Crown continued: “If I like hockey and I start reading up on Wayne Gretzky, I’m going to look up the hockey similarities, not that he was born in Brantford and I was born somewhere else. I’m not sure why you would think that Mr. Minassian would look at differences that don’t seem to be important to him.”
And here we go, falling down another rabbit hole of expert evidence, particularly from psychiatrists. Perhaps the question should be asked: “How many shrinks can dance on the head of a pin?”
Court, at this virtual judge-only trial, has heard that Minassian has been interviewed by at least half a dozen shrinks over the past 18 months. How many of them will testify is unclear. But this trial is now entirely about what was going on behind the defendant’s ears as he plotted and then committed his heinous mission.
It inevitably comes down to such psychiatric yin and yang, dueling experts from the prosecution and the defence, and where Justice Anne Molloy will land when she makes her decision far down the road.
Court has also heard — it, too, was in Bradford’s notes, and was acknowledged by the defence at the start of trial — that autism syndrome disorder has little (perhaps no) historical precedent as a basis for being not criminally responsible (NCR).
Besides which, who’s to know when Minassian was spinning lies; maybe in his nearly four-hour police interrogation, maybe in his interviews with psychiatrists and psychologists. It could all be a skein of fabrication.
Rinaldi: “You really don’t know when he’s telling the truth. It’s a problem, is it not?”
Chauhan: “He was certainly fixated when I questioned him about notoriety.”
As she wrote in her report: “His impairments in thinking creatively led him to approach his environment rigidly and impaired his ability to think of multiple response(s) or outcomes to a situation. This lack of ability to seek alternative courses of action is reflected in Mr. Minassian’s hyper fixation on the steps of planning execution of a violent act followed by his own death.”
Minassian told Det. Rob Thomas all about being a loser with women and that he’d actually hoped to kill more of them on that awful April day.
From Bradford’s notes: “In particular,
I was trying to understand his commitment to the Incel movement, which is the principal motivating force for his action, according to the videotaped statement.”
There was specifically Minassian’s recounting of the Halloween party flip-off, which was a watershed moment, allegedly turning him to Elliot Rodger and incel.
“He now reports to me today that this was all made up and that the Halloween incident is part of Rodger’s manifesto, “My Twisted World,” which implies that it is taken directly from there.
“He denies that he has been part of Incel, although he has been disappointed in the past in (his) social interactions. But when confronted about being extremely angry, enraged … he denies this now categorically and maintains hat he has only been disappointed and he made this up about being enthat raged.”
It must be stressed that Chauhan had not read these notes when she interviewed Minassian at St. Joseph’s mental health unit in Hamilton in the fall of 2018.
Minassian told Chauhan, she testified, about his “end plan” and talked about mass murder in general, a subject which had preoccupied him since high school, at least seven years before he stumbled over Elliot Roger during an Internet search and five years before that man’s lethal attack near the University of California campus.
Rinaldi: “I’m going to suggest to you, as it relates to indoctrination, he was in no way, shape or form indoctrinated by Rodgers to commit mass murder. He had mass murder on his mind well before he knew who Elliot Rodgers was or read his manifesto.”
Chauhan: “I don’t disagree that he was fantasizing about mass murder (much earlier), but (by the time of the van attack), it was every day. Yes, it’s odd that he was focusing on it even in high school, but definitely there was an intensity in that period.”
In fact, Rinaldi argued, Minassian had been more consumed and anxious about failing at the new job he’d secured upon graduating from Seneca with a
gree in software development, terrified that he’d fail. “The whole issue around Incel and the rebellion was made up.”
Chauhan said, “I didn’t talk to him too much about the Incel movement, to be honest. The focus seemed to be, a lot, on the number killed.”
Under re-examination by lead defence lawyer Boris Bytensky, Chauhan was asked whether her diagnosis of Minassian would have been different, had she known the contents of Dr. Bradford’s report.
“No.”