MANDEL: Cabbie killer restricted from roaming mental hospital grounds alone
The Ontario Review Board ruled it too dangerous to ever allow him to roam the grounds of Ontario Shores mental hospital without an escort
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A voice of sanity to protect the public.
Last year, Daniel Pestill was found not criminally responsible due to a mental disorder after he killed beloved Oshawa cabbie Michael Ryan in the belief that he was a member of an “illuminati secret society.” Suffering from psychotic symptoms as far back as 2020 and diagnosed with schizophrenia and polysubstance use disorder, he was ordered detained at Whitby’s Ontario Shores for Mental Health Sciences.
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The judge went one step further and designated Pestill, 35, as high risk – a rare designation that means when he comes before the Ontario Review Board for his annual hearing, the panel can’t impose any condition that allows him to be absent from the hospital without an escort.
But what does “hospital” entail?
At Pestill’s first annual hearing last month, the hospital, his lawyer and the attorney general’s lawyer all agreed Pestill should remain on the secure forensic floor for the upcoming year. But they also took the position that the “hospital” includes the parkland around it, so in future dispositions he could eventually be allowed to venture there alone.
What were they thinking? This killer was designated high risk for a reason.
On the afternoon of Jan. 21, 2022, the convicted drug trafficker with a history of mental illness called Blue Line Taxi for a ride from La Quinta Inn to his mother’s house in Courtice.
Ryan, of course, knew nothing about the dangerous man he’d been dispatched to pick up.
The father of twins had been driving an accessible taxi for five years and just minutes before his fatal encounter with Pestill, his wife Linda had messaged him that she had chicken and mashed potatoes waiting for dinner. But she never got a response.
The dashcam video inside the taxi showed an agitated Pestill get into the back seat and almost immediately begin accusing Ryan of being in a “secret society” that raped and killed children and that he’d come to enslave Oshawa. He pulled a Sig Sauer 40 calibre handgun from his backpack and racked it; Ryan pressed his panic alarm.
“I’m going to shoot you before I get out, just so you know,” Pestill told him.
Ryan activated the panic system again.
Pestill struck the plexiglass divider between the front and back seats with his handgun until he had an opening. He pushed the gun through and held it at Ryan’s head before striking him several times.
The cabbie pulled over and tried to escape but Pestill fired at his back. The gunman then put the gun back into his backpack and walked away, leaving Ryan dying on the road.
“Together we created a beautiful family,” his grief-stricken wife later told the court in her victim impact statement. “He was the backbone of our family. His wonderful sense of humor, his strength and his positive attitude carried us but now our family is irreparably broken.”
When he was arrested, Pestill had the loaded gun in his bag as well as $20,000, 196.5 grams of crystal meth and 75 grams of cocaine.
At his sentencing hearing in April, the judge found he was a dangerous man who’d made no progress and was still “fully immersed in his delusion about the secret society.”
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Three months later, and now on anti-psychotic medication, Pestill’s psychiatrist told the ORB he’s improving. Yet already the hospital is contemplating a time when he can wander the grounds alone despite his high risk designation?
The ORB shot that down.
The property around Ontario Shores has no fences or even any signs that identify it as part of the mental hospital.
“Essentially, the grounds of the hospital are used freely and openly by the community,” the panel wrote in an Aug. 15 decision.
“Furthermore, given that the hospital is directly across the street from, and easily accessible to, a large residential subdivision, the Panel finds that the safety of the public would be endangered, should Mr. Pestill be granted unescorted access to the hospital grounds.”
They concluded the property around Ontario Shores can’t be considered part of the hospital and as long as Pestill remains designated high risk by the court, he’s considered “absent” if he leaves the building.
And so thankfully, he can’t roam the grounds of his mental hospital alone – not now or in the future.
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