Report: Suspect in British Columbia Chinatown stabbing released 99 times without incident

A report into a triple stabbing at a festival in Vancouver's Chinatown last year said the man accused of the crimes had been released from a mental health facility 99 times the previous year without incident.

The report, written by former Abbotsford Police Chief Bob Rich, said stabbing suspect Blair Donnelly was released unaccompanied from BC Forensic Psychiatric Hospital for the 100th time on September 10, 2023, when he allegedly stabbed three festival-goers at the Light Up Chinatown Festival.

The external investigation was ordered by the provincial government after the knife attacks.

Donnelly was a resident at the hospital after he was found not criminally responsible for killing his daughter in 2006 while “suffering from a psychotic delusion that God wanted him to kill her” and subsequently ordered to undergo treatment, the inquest said.

According to the report, the man was granted unaccompanied leave in October 2009 and attempted to stab a man in Surrey, BC. He was later sentenced to 45 days in jail for assault with a weapon.

Donnelly then went “without incident for eight years” before attacking another hospital patient in 2017. However, he was again found not criminally responsible and received an “absolute discharge” from the court in that case, the report said.

According to hospital records, Donnelly was allowed to leave the hospital unsupervised 99 times between August 2022 and September 9, 2023 without any problems.

Rich's report said he found no policy violations, but noted that the hospital's “patient care model … was not optimal” for treating high-risk patients trying to “integrate” back into society.

“In my opinion, some patients will never be well enough to live in the community without supervision again,” the study says.

Rich's report makes several recommendations for better managing “high-risk patients.” These include strengthening care teams, improving policies for granting patient leave, increasing training for forensic staff, and using “risk management tools” such as GPS tracking systems.

The care team model includes a psychiatrist, a nurse and a social worker assigned to hospital patients for the duration of their stay. It was used at the facility before 2015, the investigation says, and should become standard practice again.

“It is critical to have a team that has experienced a patient’s entire hospital stay and has comprehensive knowledge of their index offenses,” the review said.

British Columbia's Ministry of Health said in a statement on Friday that it had accepted all of Rich's recommendations and had already begun implementing them. This includes “adhering to new guidelines for granting hospital leave.”

Suspects found not criminally responsible by the courts are subject to the jurisdiction of the BC Review Board, which conducts hearings and makes decisions about whether a patient should remain in custody or be allowed to live in the community.

Before the stabbings, Donnelly had appeared before the committee for an annual hearing in April 2023, and the committee concluded that he would require “continued intensive care” in hospital before being allowed unaccompanied leave.

The panel's decision from that hearing was leaked to the media after the attack, and Donnelly later attempted to prevent publication of the panel's reasoning on privacy grounds, but the attempt was rejected in October 2023.

In its decision, the panel stated that its decision-making must be open and transparent because the panel's function is not widely understood, even by members of the judiciary.

“The task of the Review Committee is to deal with persons accused of crimes – often very serious crimes – who are either not competent to stand trial due to mental illness or who have been found not criminally responsible due to mental illness.”

According to court documents, Donnelly is due back in Vancouver Provincial Court in March 2025.