Cop killer allowed into community with staff
WHITBY, ONT. — A man who killed a Toronto police officer with a snowplow has been allowed out of his secure unit at a mental health facility and into the community three times in the past month, a hearing was told Tuesday.
Richard Kachkar has been detained in the Ontario Shores mental health hospital in Whitby for about a year since he was found not criminally responsible for killing Sgt. Ryan Russell.
The Ontario Review Board, which decides if and how NCR patients should be detained, stirred controversy when it ruled last year that Kachkar should be allowed escorted trips into the community. The Crown appealed the decision and lost.
The hospital didn’t let Kachkar off the hospital grounds while the issue was still under appeal, but in just the past month he has been three times to a nearby plaza accompanied by staff members, Kachkar’s annual review board hearing was told.
The development alarmed Russell’s widow, Christine Russell.
“I still feel that he’s a very dangerous man,” she said after the hearing. “I think it’s a gamble and it’s a risk and I don’t think society should be subjected to such risks.”
“Richard Kachkar stole my two-yearold son’s father,” said Russell of her son, who is now five. “My son doesn’t remember his dad. He only knows his dad through photographs and the stories that we tell. He will never get his dad back. Richard Kachkar also stole my husband and my best friend. He robbed me of my future and the life that we had together.”
Kachkar wants the review board to transfer him to a less secure, general forensic unit at Ontario Shores, but his medical team feels he’s not ready.
Dr. Zohar Waisman, Kachkar’s attending psychiatrist, told the board he still does not have a definitive diagnosis for Kachkar, other than he falls somewhere in the spectrum of psychosis.
Waisman said it is too soon to move Kachkar to a less secure, general forensic unit, as he wishes, but noted that Kachkar is making progress.
He has completed various programs at the hospital, such as behavioural therapy,, Waisman said.