Accused is schizophrenic, doctor tells jury

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This article was published 31/03/2017 (3142 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A psychiatrist said he believes an accused killer he treated for five years has schizophrenia.

The second-degree murder trial of Teklu Mebrahtu continued Friday with testimony from Dr. Daniel Globerman, a remand centre pyschiatrist who saw the accused about 64 times since Mebrahtu’s arrest in January 2012 — after he phoned 911 to report he’d killed his wife. Alche Kidane, 34, was found dead in the bathtub of the couple’s Assiniboine Avenue apartment suite when police arrived. The Eritrean couple had immigrated to Winnipeg from Sudan less than six months earlier.

The question facing Court of Queen’s Bench Justice Shawn Greenberg is not if Mebrahtu is responsible for his wife’s death, but if he can be held criminally responsible for second-degree murder.

Globerman first saw Mebrahtu in May 2012, a few months after his arrest. He testified he believed a court-ordered mental-health assessment should have been requested immediately, but it wasn’t done until more than two years later, after Mebrahtu’s former lawyer visited him in jail in September 2014. At first, Globerman believed Mebrahtu was experiencing psychotic episodes in the midst of clinical depression — the doctor supposed the stress of immigrating to Canada could have triggered Mebrahtu’s psychotic breaks. Later, though, his diagnosis changed to schizophrenia, an illness for which the accused is currently taking medication.

Mebrahtu reported hearing voices and having delusions, and would sometimes randomly shout or go mute, Globerman said. While in custody, Mebrahtu spent four months in the psychiatric ward at the Health Sciences Centre, where he received electric-shock treatment to bring him out of a catatonic state, court heard. He was prescribed anti-psychotic medication, which he chose to stop taking on a couple of occasions. He claimed he could hear voices that seemed to be coming from the television, other inmates or even his psychiatrist. The voices spoke in his native Tigrinya and told him he did not kill his wife. The voices chanted this phrase in his head during a court appearance in May 2015, which prompted him to shout “I didn’t kill my wife!” he later explained to Globerman.

Globerman was not responsible for completing the court-ordered assessments of Mebrahtu and didn’t talk to him about the alleged offence. He testified he did not believe Mebrahtu was faking his symptoms.

“At no point did I think they were inauthentic,” he said in response to questions from defence lawyer Wendy Martin White Friday. “I never felt that this man was malingering.”

The defence is expected to seek a not-criminally-responsible (NCR) designation. An NCR assessment is meant to determine whether the accused’s mental state at the time of the offence would have affected his culpability.

Globerman said the assessment ideally would have been done immediately or as soon as possible after the offence.

Such an assessment is complicated by language barriers, cultural differences and the fact that Mebrahtu has now been in jail for more than five years.

Earlier on Friday, a doctor who had treated Mebrahtu less than a month before his wife was found stabbed to death testified that he prescribed him vitamins and sent him home.

Dr. Bharat Shah testified he first saw Mebrahtu on Dec. 19, 2011, and he reported having felt “very afraid” within the last week, lacked concentration and wasn’t eating much. The doctor said he ran lab tests that all came back normal and questioned whether Mebrahtu had experienced temporary delirium. At a second visit on Dec. 29 that year, Mebrahtu seemed stable. Shah testified he prescribed him a multivitamin. He didn’t refer him to a mental-health professional or give him any other medication, Shah confirmed under questioning from Crown attorney Daniel Chaput.

“I didn’t see any need for medications at that time,” he said.

Mebrahtu had been brought to the doctor by his wife’s brother, who sponsored the couple’s immigration and was concerned about his brother-in-law’s mental health. On Jan. 23, 2012, Kidane was found dead.

katie.may@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @thatkatiemay