Rehabilitating a Reluctant Bi-polar Killer
"[Escobedo-Hoyo accepts his bipolar disorder diagnosis, knows he must accept medication but he remains] closed off, [quiet and] guarded."
"Given his legal training and legal knowledge he might be a little bit more aware of legal strategy and how to present himself at times."
"He's guarded because he's being strategic [wishing to present himself in] the most positive light possible."
"It's difficult for us [medical staff involved in his medical protocol] to know what he really thinks. He has an illness that will require active medication management for the rest of his life."
"[He says he doesn't want to use [illegal drugs] substances again but that's a] superficial answer [and] it's hard to know if he'll do what he says."
Dr. Joel Watts, forensic psychiatrist, Royal Ottawa Hospital
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| Nick Hickey was walking down the sidewalk of his Bells Corners
neighbourhood | in January 2018 when he was struck and killed by a car.
The driver of that car, Guillermo Escobedo-Hoyo, was found not
criminally responsible Friday. (Supplied) |
In other words, a belligerent man who is quite aware that he suffers from a malignant mental illness whose effects can send him into random psychosis where he will commit violently lethal acts against perfect strangers will not commit to the kind of ongoing treatment that includes mood stabilizers and anti-psychotic medication. He will not, in effect, take responsibility for his condition, much less what that condition spells in danger to the general public.
He is not open with the medical staff attempting to guide him toward a place of moderate balance to enable him to get on with his life, and they are left in a limbo of puzzled expectation. As such, he remains a potential threat to society. He was just such a threat when he deliberately and with a malice that justice ascribes to a mental condition, took the life of a 17-year-old Nick Hickey just walking in his neighbourhood in 2018, when he was lethally rammed by a car driven by Guillermo Escobedo-Hoyo.
The boy was striding along the sidewalk when Escobedo-Hoyo aimed his vehicle directly toward the boy and ran him over, reversed, hit a truck, stripped naked and then smashed an OC Transpo bus window with terrified passengers watching from within, going on to invade the home of a senior where he demanded a gun, and was finally located when police discovered him inside a neighbour's parked Jeep.
Nick Hickey's ribs, brain stem and spinal cord had been crushed; he died almost immediately from blunt force trauma.
This man's state of mind precluded his knowing what he was doing, according to a finding by a criminal court. He had no idea what he was doing was legal, or that it represented a horrific moral crime. The man has a law degree. He left his native Mexico for Canada, claiming he needed refuge, he was escaping an unstable and dangerous hometown. His family, on the other hand, has a different viewpoint, that the area is entirely safe. In Canada since 2013, he had a work visa to allow him to be employed as a paralegal.
Dr. Watts's concern is that if Escobedo-Hoyo were to abruptly refrain from taking his medication he might once again exhibit bipolar symptoms in the passage of a few days. And to exacerbate the situation, if he decided to begin again using drugs as he had in the past, the symptoms of psychosis would be bumped forward. The medical professionals at the hospital would like the man to begin addiction treatment.
This would move him forward to a rehabilitation unit where he could be discharged into the community in the space of a year. Escobedo-Hoyo informed the doctors who assessed his condition and diagnosed him as not criminally responsible that this was the diagnosis he wanted to be enabled to remain in Canada. He has since changed his mind; confined to being held at the Royal Ottawa Hospital, he prefers to be deported back to Mexico.
But the Catch-22 is that as long as he is subject to the supervision of the Ontario Review Board he must remain in Canada. The alternative is to hold him accountable for murdering Nick Hickey, setting aside the agreement that he was not criminally responsible due to mental illness. A mental illness he appears to be satisfied that he can live with without resorting to the kind of remedial holding treatment that mental health experts know will keep his tendency to violence in check.
The family and the mother of 17-year-old Nick Hickey await justice. They would have found a remote comfort in a sincere expression of remorse on the part of this man with the ample ego, but no space for compassion or concern for the welfare of others.
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| Guillermo Escobedo-Hoyo, a paralegal, was found not criminally responsible in connection with the death of Nick Hickey.
LinkedIn |
Labels: Justice, Murder, Not Criminally Responsible
Trafficking in Chinese Brides
"We trusted them. I had a sense I was being sold, but I could not escape."
"I said I didn't want to get married. I wanted to go home."
"When I saw Burmese letters on the signs, I was so happy [on her return to Myanmar]."
Phyu, 17, Burmese trafficked to China as a 'bride'
"The families of the husbands are mad about the case because they spent a lot of money but lost their wives."
Niu Tianhui, spokesman, Xiangcheng police bureau
"Bride trafficking is very common here in Shan State."
Zaw Min tun, member, anti-human-trafficking task force, northern Shan
"[Her baby, 9 days old, looks] like her father. The same lips. Chinese."
"I wanted to give her away but I looked at her and I loved her."
"Even with that Chinese animal's lips."
Nyo, 17, Burmese trafficked to China as a 'bride'
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| The Human Rights Watch report found vulnerable young women from
Myanmar’s conflict-ravaged northern Kachin and Shan states are being
trafficked into sexual slavery in China
(
AFP/Getty
)
|
Two schoolgirls, good friends, lured by a neighbour, Daw San Kyi, promising them well paid waitressing employment if they would travel to the border with China. He knew a wealthy villager who would assist them, so early one morning a year ago, a van arrived to pick them up and take them to the identified destination. There was a long drive on a mountain road that made Phyu nauseated. Four pills given her by Ms. San Kyi helped, leaving Phyu disoriented, but she recalled that someone used a syringe to inject her arm with a substance.
Her friend Nyo, also 16 years old, refused pills and she recalls some of what occurred but her memory too is confused. There were guesthouses along the border where they stopped and there they were informed that heavy rain had closed the area and the roads closest to the restaurant where work awaited them. A boat ride ensued and then additional car travel. They were a full ten days in transit and by then it seemed that the restaurant promise was nowhere in sight. The girls attempted to free themselves and run home but failed.
They were in a strange place with a strange language and had no idea where they were, where they could run to. Chinese-speaking men arrived to look at them. Some of them pointed at Phyu, others at Nyo. When Phyu began crying, the trafficker said she must stop otherwise she would not look pretty enough to attract a potential husband. The girls were taken separately and paired each with a 'husband'. They thought they might be in Beijing.
Phyu was locked into a room by her 'husband' Yuan Feng, 21. Yuan would arrive in the evenings, inject something into her arm and force sex on her. Nyo was also locked in a room by her 'husband' Gao Ji; she was beaten. Once he began to trust her he allowed her to use social media and that is how she discovered that she was in Xiangcheng County, Henan Province, one of China's most populous provinces, with 100 million people, double the population of Myanmar.
Henan Province has one of the widest gender disparities in China, thanks to the gender-based abortions forced on Chinese for 30 years with their one-child policy, with the emphasis on boy babies, and where female babies were aborted or abandoned. Now that the boy babies are grown there are no female counterparts for them, leading Chinese men to import wives from countries nearby, forcibly if need be.
Phyu, it turned out was in Xiangcheng as well. A Shan Chinese woman who helped to rescue girls such as Nyo and Phyu from sexual slavery in China alerted a police officer and two months after the girls' arrival in Xiangcheng, police knocked on their husbands' doors. The law mandated that Mr. Yuan and Mr. Gao be detained for 30 days. Giving the girls the opportunity to leave and weeks later they returned to Mongyai, Myanmar.
Nyo was pregnant, and she decided the child would be given up for adoption. And when the baby was born she was unable to part with the tiny girl.
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| Photograph, Minzavar, The New York Times |
Labels: Brides, China, Myanmar, Sex Slaves
Venezuela's Madura Tottering Toward Collapse
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| Antonio Rivero, a retired general now living in the United States, was
shocked in 2008 when he suddenly began encountering Cuban officials in
military meetings and training. REUTERS/Carlos Garcia Rawlins |
"[The Venezuelan government subjects prisoners viewed by them as political opponents to] electric shocks, suffocation with plastic bags, water boarding, beatings, sexual violence, water and food deprivation, stress positions and exposure to extreme temperatures."
Michelle Bachelet, UN Human Rights commissioner
"The abuse of military officers has grown because they represent a real threat for Maduro's government."
"This has been Maduro's decision. He's the one giving orders there."
General Manuel Cristopher Figuera, former head, Venezuelan intelligence
"If we stay silent, they win."
"This is what they want, to make everyone live in fear."
Carmen Acosta, Maracay, Venezuela
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| A proliferation of flag officers means even top
officials, like Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino (speaking) and Admiral
Remigio Ceballos (right), have limited ability to command.
REUTERS/Handout/Venezuelan presidency |
Venezuela's military has been loyal to its president, Nicolas Madura; which is to say up to the present point. Just as over four million Venezuelans have become refugees, fleeing the country of their birth where they cannot find employment, where food and medicine has become scarce, where graft, corruption and violence grow exponentially as the country continues to fall into greater depths of dysfunction, the military too is discovering that the shortages of life-sustaining fundamental elements of civilized existence are now affecting them as well.
The country, rich in the enviable natural resources that once made it the generous supplier of petroleum products to its neighbours has been incapable of managing its own resources, and even oil to run industry, much less vehicles is in short supply, its economy crimped and crumbling. Most top military leaders remain loyal to their chief, the president; they are not suffering the kind of deprivation that lower-grade officers much less general conscripts do. Yet among them are those whose allegiance is now suspect.
Retired Naval Captain Rafael Acosta was among them, arrested by the country's intelligence forces and by the time he appeared at a military tribunal he was in a wheelchair, the product of torture, begging his lawyer to "help me". Three weeks later he was being buried, his body wrapped in brown plastic. Leaked autopsy report detailed blunt force trauma and electrocution. A signal notice to others in the military of the fate that awaits them should they too be suspected of turning against their president.
Factions inside the military and security forces have staged a number of attempts at overthrowing or assassinating Nicolas Maduro, their reward so far swift with state media naming the threats
"a continuous coup", leading the Socialist Party justifying surveillance, arbitrary detention and torture of 'enemies' within the country's 160,000-strong armed forces -- to prevent plots claimed to number a dozen and more, all intercepted, those accused summarily dealt with.
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| The late Hugo Chávez (front row, in red cap) a
former lieutenant colonel and coup leader who was elected president in
1998, began remaking the military almost as soon as he took office.
REUTERS/Handout/Venezuelan presidency |
Maduro's government considers the military a threat to its existence, no longer as trusted as they once were before the country was felled by inept governance, tyranny, corruption, threats and economic collapse. According to the Coalition for Human Rights and Democracy based in Caracas, 217 active and retired military officers are held in Venezuelan jails, including a dozen generals. At least 250 cases of torture committed by the security forces against military officers, their relatives and opposition activists have been documented by the coalition since 2017, with many victims years in jail without trial.
"[The weaker the government is] the stronger is the torture against the people they consider dangerous", explained coalition lawyer, Ana Leonor Acosta. Juan Carlos Caguaripano, a National Guard captain, led a failed assault on a military base in 2017 and was rewarded by being beaten, suffering testicle injuries. Oscar Perez, police officer who led an anti-government guerrilla unit, shot 14 times at close range by security officers January 2018, after offering repeatedly to surrender while involved in a shootout he broadcast live on social media.
Venezuelan Air Force Major Andrik Carrizales, shot in the head by security officers after joining a failed effort to take over a weapons factory in Maracay onApril 30. Maracay is home to the nation's main air bases and military academies.
Labels: Economic Collapse, Maduro, Military, Venezuela
