The schizophrenic woman who committed a notorious killing of an innocent stranger in a downtown Toronto Shoppers Drug Mart more than 10 years ago has been granted an absolute discharge, freeing her entirely from the restrictions of the justice system.
In 2015, Rohinie Bisesar, then 40 and now 51, stabbed Rosemarie Junor in the cosmetics section of the drug store in Toronto’s financial district underground PATH, following the malicious command hallucinations of a voice in her head she called the “entity.”
Junor, 28, who also went by “Kim,” was newly married and worked in a downtown private medical clinic. She died five days later in hospital of a single stab wound by a small kitchen knife that pierced her heart.
“While the tragedy cannot be undone and will always be on our minds, Ms. Bisesar no longer is a significant threat to the safety of the public, and the law requires that an absolute discharge must be imposed. Ms. Bisesar’s commitment to her present health has substantially contributed to this result,” reads the Ontario Review Board’s new decision.
It was a horrific story that transfixed the city with its incomprehensible violence from an unlikely offender. Bisesar was a tiny woman, 4 foot 11 and 85 pounds, whose life appeared to have recently and abruptly unraveled from professional success to the point of spontaneous insane homicide.
She had an MBA from a top Ontario school and had worked in a major financial firm, but she had been hospitalized a year before the killing after threatening her parents with arson and expressing bizarre paranoia. Unemployed, she continued to frequent the financial district and became a familiar regular at downtown coffee shops, neatly dressed and working on a laptop.
Then, on a Friday mid-afternoon in December, according to facts recorded at her 2018 trial, the voice in her head said “What is the worse thing you can do?” and told her to get a knife. She travelled a dozen subway stops uptown to a discount store to buy one, a small kitchen knife, then returned downtown.
In the PATH, she sat on a bench beside a woman and considered stabbing her, but then “the entity picked me up from the bench and had me start walking really fast.”
She saw Junor on the phone in the nail polish section of the Shoppers, and almost immediately, 24 seconds later, she stabbed her in the upper chest and fled. She was identified by security footage and arrested four days later at a residence in the east end.
Curiously, just 10 minutes before the reported time of the arrest, the National Post received an email from Bisesar’s personal email address, which appeared to be from her though this could not be independently confirmed. “Do you know any top professionals in artificial intelligence, biotechnology, nanotechnology, satellites?” it said. “Something has been happening to me and this is not my normal self and I would like to know who and why this is happening.”
The email then addressed the stabbing.
“I am sorry about the incidence,” the email said. “I felt the need to be extreme to see if it would work. I would normally not do such a thing.”
Bisesar spent three years in jail before her trial by a judge alone, at which prosecutors and defence agreed she was not criminally responsible by reason of mental disorder.
It was a long road to that decision. An early videolink court appearance was derailed by her rant about terrorists and the prime minister.
Two years after the killing, she went before a jury who heard a psychiatrist testify she was psychotic. A jury agreed she was unfit to stand trial and unable to properly participate in her defence.
A year after that, the same psychiatrist found her mental health “radically improved,” her schizophrenia effectively in remission through medication, and a jury agreed she was fit to be tried.
After the NCR verdict, Bisesar was in secure detention in a mental hospital until 2021, when she was discharged from hospital to independent housing in the community, with her psychotic symptoms controlled by medication and in full remission.
People found not criminally responsible for serious crimes have annual appearances before a review board, which considers the terms of their continued treatment and secure detention in hospital.
Some people found NCR end up spending more time in secure hospital detention than they would have spent in prison under a guilty verdict to a crime. Some personality disorders, for example, are effectively incurable and a review board never decides a person’s risk to the public is below the legal threshold for release. In those cases, their detention is basically indefinite.
But schizophrenia is treatable with medications, and so sometimes the period of confinement is much less than what a murderer would get in prison for the same killing. The most famous example is Vince Li, who killed Tim McLean, 22, on a Manitoba intercity bus in 2008 and cannibalized parts of his body. Like Bisesar, his schizophrenia was medically controlled after his NCR verdict, and he was granted an absolute discharge less than a decade after the killing.
Bisesar received a conditional discharge in 2023, requiring her to remain under outpatient forensic psychiatric care of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto. She is unemployed, lives alone on disability assistance, and does volunteer work. She is on a long-acting injectable anti-psychotic and has been compliant with medication and therapy.
Last year, she was denied an absolute discharge when the Ontario Review Board found she “continues to pose a significant threat to the safety of the public,” though a minority of the panel found she did not.
This recent decision to grant her an absolute discharge — effectively closing the books on her case — reflects the hospital’s view that she no longer poses such a threat. It notes that she “understands that she has a major mental illness that requires treatment in perpetuity.”
It notes that at the time of her offence in 2015 Bisesar was “floridly psychotic, untreated and desperately unwell.”
National Post
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