Report: Suspect in triple stabbing in British Columbia had day pass without escort

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, states that Blair Donnelly was released unaccompanied from the 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.

An external investigation commissioned by the provincial government after the stabbings found that Donnelly was not criminally responsible due to a mental disorder (NCRMD) for the murder of his daughter in 2006, when he “suffered from a psychotic delusion that God wanted him to kill her.”

According to BC Review Board documents, he also stabbed a friend while he was on a day vacation in 2009 and attacked a fellow patient with a butter knife shortly after returning from vacation in 2017.

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

British Columbia's Ministry of Health said it had accepted all of Rich's recommendations and had already begun implementing them, including “adhering to new guidelines for granting hospital leave.”

Generally, patients at FPH are entitled to a Review Board hearing once per year to evaluate their custody rights. The hearings determine what type of leave or time off a patient is eligible for, including community outings.

Once someone is determined to be eligible for day passes, hospital staff will conduct safety assessments to decide whether outings should be allowed.

The committee's papers on Donnelly noted that he had resorted to “sudden” violence in the past.

He was the subject of a BCRB hearing on April 13, 2023, five months before the Chinatown stabbings, and was subsequently granted leave from the hospital, including overnight stays in the community, for up to 28 days, at the discretion of the facility's director.

The sentencing document from the hearing states that Donnelly's leave is “to support his reintegration into society.”

But the key findings Rich made in his report were: “In my opinion, some patients will never be well enough to live unsupervised in the community again.”

Donnelly has been charged with three counts of aggravated assault in connection with the stabbings last year. All three victims – a couple in their 60s and a woman in her 20s – were seriously injured.

He is due to appear again in Vancouver Provincial Court in March 2025.

At the time of the stabbings, British Columbia Premier David Eby told reporters he was “out of his mind” about approving Donnelly's unsupervised release.