Stranger killer is criminally responsible, psychiatrist says

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He knew what he was doing.

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When Richard Edwin went hunting for random strangers on the streets of Toronto, he didn't tell his parents or a close friend because he knew they wouldn't approve: “They'll probably think I'm wrong. They'll think I'm throwing my life away. They want me to progress,” Edwin explained.

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This is just one of many signs, says Dr. Alina Joseph, that Edwin knew – despite his schizophrenia – that killing people was legally and morally wrong.

And that's one of many reasons why a forensic psychiatrist believes the double killer doesn't meet the criteria to be found. bears no criminal liability due to mental disorder during senseless executions 19-year-old international student Karthik Vasudev on April 7, 2022 and 35-year-old Elijah Mahepat two days later.

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“I think Mr. Edwin made a choice based on what he heard,” she told Superior Court Judge Jane Kelly. “I think at the same time he was making an assessment and he knew that other members of the community, including his family, would think it was wrong.”

Edwin told psychiatrists that he was simply following orders given to him by the “body language community”—friendly allies who helped in his long-running battle against white supremacists by sending him signals to kill.

“Edwin acknowledged that the victim was innocent and that it was wrong to kill an innocent person, but “I just obeyed what I heard,” Joseph testified, quoting Edwin. “He admitted that he intended to kill the victim and that it was “generally wrong to kill an innocent person. But in this case it didn’t happen because the man on the tree stump told me.”

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“I destroyed two families”

Now on medication, he told the psychiatrist that he felt very stupid. “I destroyed two families… if I was reasonable, I would never have done this.”

Joseph argued that although Edwin was psychotic at the time, he was still able to think for himself and did not act like some kind of “automatic machine”. He told her that if the body language community had ordered him to kill a woman or child, he would not have obeyed – further proof, she said, that he was in control of what he did.

Edwin was first diagnosed with schizophrenia in 2010. He lived in his own apartment, earned $1,300 every two weeks selling self-published magazines, had a boyfriend and girlfriend, and had no previous contact with police.

“Mr. Edwin is not a vegetable. He does not depend hand and foot on his family, he cannot do anything on his own, he just sits in front of the TV and eats some chips,” Joseph argued. “Mr Edwin is a man who actually leads a very reasonable life considering he suffers from a serious mental illness and has gone untreated for many years.”

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Expert believes Edwin should be found in NKR

Her opinion stands in stark contrast to that of Dr. Lisa Ramshaw, an expert called by the defence, who believes Edwin should be found in the NCR, which would mean that instead of life imprisonment, he would be subject to the jurisdiction of the Ontario Review Board until he no longer poses a further danger to the public.

Edwin told Ramshaw that he would have to listen to the voices to kill, otherwise white supremacists would drop bombs on St. Lucia, where his father lived, and Jamaica, where his mother often lived, and white supremacists from Ukraine would come to kill him.

However, Edwin never mentioned this during his two interviews with Joseph, she said.

Joseph also found it a strange “coincidence” that just the day before the killings began, Edwin was asking his father how to import firearms into Jamaica and was searching the Internet for information about gun stores in Jamaica.

Edwin began amassing his arsenal of self-defense weapons in 2017 after he became concerned about the economic collapse and street unrest and told her he carried a loaded weapon with him every day. When Joseph challenged him about the need to arm himself, he offered an explanation that was chilling in its ignorance of himself.

“There are a lot of crazy people in the city,” the killer told her.

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